Vocabulary of the Blog

The other day I came across an interesting program called Wordle. The site grabs your RSS feed and turns it into a word mosaic - making most used words larger. So of course I checked my own blog and created the following:

What I actually found most interesting was the way it emphasized my apparently limited vocabulary on the blog. With words such as great, fun, and really jumping out - I actually got an unfortunately clear view of my writing (I'm blaming it all on emailing).

I thought a really interesting project with your students would be to take their work - even all of their essays - dump them into a blog on blogger, and then run them through Wordle to see what words come up most. The exercise should improve vocabulary and also be a bit of ... (anything fun) unbridled enthusiasm....? I'm trying anyways.

You could also do this as a class project to see what vocabulary words in general your students use most.