I chose to make a Wordle of my short story “Farsighted” that I wrote last semester in an honors seminar. I chose this story because it is the longest thing I have written, so there would be more for the Wordle generator to work with. Plus, I figured it would help me analyze my writing style and word choices.
It is apparent that the two most used words are “Jacob” and “Harper.” This makes sense because they are the names of the two main characters. Also, this story is written in third person, so I addressed them with their names and respective pronouns.
What was a little disappointing to me as writer was the fact that it appears that the next most used words are “just” and “back.” When I first saw them on the Wordle, I was surprised, thinking that those were two odd words to be used so frequently. But then when I looked back (haha…there’s that word again) at my story, I realized that I did used them quite a bit. My story is full of phrases such as “just because,” “just as,” “just then,” “standing back up,” “looking back up,” and “walking back over.” These phrases are fine every once in a while, but after a while it seems a bit repetitive and takes away from the quality of writing.
Another common word I used was “eyes.” This was a word that I thought made sense to be used so many times. First of all, the name of the story is “Farsighted,” which has to do with eyesight. Jacob is constantly telling Harper to get her eyes checked out (both literally and metaphorically), because she can’t see what’s right in front of her. Also, when I write, I tend to show emotion through the description of my characters’ eyes, through phrases like “bright eyes,” “watering eyes,” “averted eyes,” and “eyes burning with intensity.”
What this Wordle doesn’t tell you is the premise of my story. Basically, it’s your typical best-friends-into-lovers type of story. Jacob and Harper are best friends, but Jacob is in love with Harper and is waiting for her to figure out that she actually loves him too. But interestingly enough, “love” is not that common of a word in the story, and neither is “friend.” You would think that they would be the most common, considering that they are two major themes in the story. But this is due to the fact that themes don’t simply arise from the words in the story–they come from the meaning of the words as a whole.
What would be really cool is if there was a distant reading tool that was able to visualize the meaning of the text, as well as the themes. I’m not really sure how it would work, but it would be really neat of somehow it was organized so that the theme was the largest word, and then all associated words with that theme were smaller and underneath or around it. I think that would be another interesting way to use distant reading tools.