Sunday, April 12, 2015

"What Do You Really Write About" Challenge

Recently on his blog, Albert Fernandez wrote a post called "What Do You Really Write About"; in it, he discusses how he was interested in seeing about what he was truly writing in his blog and if it lined up with what he thought he was writing about, i.e., did a disconnect exist? To discover this, he entered his blog into Wordle and created a word cloud. He writes:
It’s interesting to see what I talk about the most. The biggest words are “kids,” “story,” and “students,” followed “time,” “class,” and “Roberta,” the name of one of the main characters in a series of stories I wrote on the site. These words are all big and in the center of the word cloud, which is exactly where they should be. They are the main focus of my instruction.
It’s also interesting to think about what is small or not there: not much about textbook activities or conjugation. “Grammar” is there, but it is small and out of the way, which is exactly the way that it should be in my classroom: something that should be there, but not the main focus of the class and definitely not at the center of instruction. 
At the end of his post, he challenges other bloggers to do the same. Intrigued by this (and reading about how Cynthia Hitz undertook the challenge), I too took up the task and cut/paste the last 6 months of my blog into Wordle (over 10,500 words). Would I be surprised by what I saw? Below is what my word cloud told me:




My biggest words are students, Latin, language, word/words, story, vocabularymeaning, and teachers. I am relieved, because it solidifies what my focus has been for this blog. I do not even see the word grammar - is it there? Granted, there is still a year's worth of my blog which I did not enter into Wordle (perhaps I wrote about grammar big time there), but I am pleased by what I see. 

So if you blog, consider this challenge - about what are you truly writing?

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