Despite thinking what I’m about to do is a go0fy waste of time and almost* entirely useless, I am, indeed, about to do it.

Here are three wordclouds from my term papers for the three classes I took this semester, along with their working titles.  (The titles they ended up with were less interesting/less accurate, fwiw.)  Nothing about the three of these is really astonishing, though I wish there were more synonyms for ‘derivational morphology’ because it’s quite a mouthful and really hard to avoid in a paper about, you know, derivational morphology.  That the word ‘though’ appears so much in that paper is mostly a tribute to my bad writing, but some of that size in the cloud might be the result of the conflicting conclusions I was trying to come to.

Sociophonetics: ‘In Which I Write About Watching The Daily Show a Lot.’

Morphology. ‘A Half-Baked Analysis of Suffixes in Some L2 English Corpus’

Formal Approaches to Language Acquisition: ‘A Surprisingly Rigorous Analysis of a Whole Lot of Estonian L1 Data That Might Actually Be Worth Reading’

*Almost.  One time, I did one of these before I turned in a paper and was surprised and embarrassed to see ‘however’** appear in roughly the same size as one of the keywords I’d used in the document’s metadata.  The paper was not about conjunctions.

**Merriam-Webster has the ‘although’ meaning of however listed as archaic, with the main definition being ‘in whatever manner or way.’  Is that crazy?  That word is practically 100% a conjunction in my mind (see previous paragraph), but I’ve been called out before for over-/mis-using however, so whatever.