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@bookjewel has developed a new wiki for educators and collaboration on teaching ideas. She used a web application called imagechef to make WORDLES in various shapes. Hers is a star; very cool!

Wordle created from the text of McCain's concession speech; from a Plurk message that I didn't bookmark.

use this as a compare/contrast of Obama's and McCain's acceptance/concession speech

I totally agree with your comment about WORDLE serving to highlight the commanlities. As an EFL teacher, I tend to focus a lot on the common words in English, as these are the words that define our fluency in the language. I use the BNL2709 vocabulary profiler for this at http://lextutor.ca/vp/bnl -- when you compare McCain and Obama's use of the most common words in their speeches, it can be a good starting point for a compare/contrast analysis which is accessible to most EFL students (well, those above B1 on the CEFR scale). When I get a good result for a WORDLE, I save it to the public gallery. Perhaps interesting to view WORDLEs focusing on the common words in English below with your WORDLE of unfiltered words in the McCain speech in mind. Compare the two WORLDEs http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/289555/Obama_Speech_5-11-08_-_BNL2709 http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/289552/McCain_Speech_5-11-08_-_BNL2709 Notice the differences in frequency of words in both speeches (campaign, bless, nation, unite, promise, achieve, white). Also of note are the words that appear in one and not the other like fail, victory, generation. :) Creating complementary WORDLEs like this can be another useful way to explore the compare/contrast issue that you mention.

a similar application to WORDLE