Wordles as Visual Narratives -- Can You Identify These Famous Works of Literature?

5/27/2014

by Glen Downey, Comics in Education, www.comicsineducation.com

At Comics in Education, we conceptualize visual narrative as a broader category than what we think of as traditional comics and graphic novels. Its implications and applications for the K-12 classroom are likewise also broader. Take, for instance, the three novels below whose first chapters are rendered as Wordles. It turns out that these tag clouds can generate some exciting activities:

Novel #1, Chapter 1

Novel #2, Chapter 1

Novel #3, Chapter 1

Think about the great thinking and problem-solving activities that students can engage in with these Wordles. They can be used as a pre-reading activity in getting students to consider what the works they are about to study might deal with. Consider the following:

The first Wordle stresses the importance of a family, with a hint that the novel may well explore what is and what will come.
The second Wordle suggest the confrontation of a young person and a man, perhaps near a church, with the young man using the word "Sir" an awful lot.
The third Wordle focuses on a man, perhaps just one man, and what he might "see." The word "river" and the word "station" are both prominent, so we wonder if a journey of some kind will be involved.

You can see that activities during and after reading also suggest themselves, and that analyzing the word distributions here can be a fantastic springboard into a fuller investigation of the styles of the three authors.

No doubt, some of you are yelling at your laptop or handheld and calling out the names of the novels as you read this. If that's you, then Tweet your answers to me @teachingcomics or @GlenDowney. The first person to get all three correct will be immortalized for their victory in this very blog post!

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