As If Shakespeare Lacked for Word Play!

Just imagine little ol' Bill Shakespeare dipping his 'quill' in the 2.0 publishing 'ink' we all seem to take for granted these days.  What magic or garbage might he have ushered forth had he been able to publish, edit, and perform on-going works at the speed of the an atom exploding?

• Would he have become the extraordinary?
• Or he merely have been some laptop desk jockey-hack sipping the melodrama of yet another Starbuckian latte, christening the gods of oft-handed expression with yet another blog link expose about why we no longer can craft words of any meaning in 140-character thought-bursts?

Beyond me to answer such a ageless lit quandry, as one not so wise in the ways of turn-the-clock-back science. 

But because I've always wondered (I'm funny like that) what a major chunk of his pseudo high-drama king-kills-king play, Macbeth, would have looked like in a creative cloud tag (what, you too?!), at least I can answer that question now thanks to Alan Levine's (aka @cogdog) mention of Wordle in a recent tweet and blog post of his.

Dawns on me that it would be intriguing to run my students' own essay through a Wordle cloud tag blender to show them in real terms which words bullrushed the reader's mindspace: 

• Would words like "like" run roughshod over the rest in visual cacophony of rad-ness?
• Or would it be an obnoxious -- and seldom grasped -- litany of hey, look at my SAT word explosion choices instead?

Mmm. 

Since I'm going to make it a grade-impacting requirement this coming fall that that they submit every essay (in-class and formal/typed alike) to me in 'digital' and 'paper' forms (alike), it wouldn't be that hard to do a little cut-n-paste job into Wordle to see what pops up. 

Mmm.

Yet another English classroom geek moment is born!

Comments

[Matt]

Thanks for sharing about Wordle; this has some real promise across the curriculum. I tried it out on the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Interesting stuff.