Mapping the key words
I have a new favourite website: anyone else come across Wordle? Here, for example, is a pictorial illustration of our posts at The Proposal Guys over the past (nearly) three years:
That’s rather fun. But let’s play with the proposal-specific applications here. Here’s a Wordle of the content of an RFP that I wrote back in my purchasing days (with a few words taken out to protect confidentiality):
See how easy it would be to drop your customer’s requirements document into this, and get a view of their pet phrases and key issues?
And, of course, it’s great for reviewing your draft proposals. At a glance, you can see whether you’re talking more about your own organisation than the customer; you can see whether your key themes are coming through strongly; you can compare the language used in different sections of your proposal; you can see how your language matches the map you made earlier of the customer’s RFP.
It does get rather addictive – especially since you can play with colour palettes, layout, text orientation and suchlike. Here’s a final picture – showing the words in the APMP accreditation syllabus. This one taught me that a little “playing around” is sometimes needed – for example, the phrase ‘the candidate should’ appears in almost every line of the APMP document, and it contains numerous codes, so I deleted these before creating the picture. It suggests that the most important things are that we understand the management and development of a proposal for a customer – pretty much spot on, I think, although I wish the word “winning” was more prominent!
You can create you own Wordles by going here. Have fun!
This article was written by Jon on 1 April, 2009 and filed under Musings. If you found it useful, you can with others. To receive automatic updates, subscribe to The Proposal Guys via 
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I have had so much fun with that site this evening, thank you!
Very cool, thanks!
Hi Jon – this is a really cool idea. My question is – is there any way we could have the words come out in a certain shape (i.e. have my group of words wordle in the shape of an apple)?
It’s fun, isn’t it?
Christine – there’s a menu on the site that lets you play with the structure – more or less square, words vertically / horizontally / both. But I haven’t seen an option that lets you use a specific shape. That’s be so cool, though!
[...] Of course, I had to look up a few words. I tried ‘geek’ and found some interesting Pictures of people (ok, that’s an understatement. What I found were pictures of some really strange/scary individuals. All the more so because I think I have worked with a couple of them on proposal efforts!). I then entered the word “proposals”. Interestingly, one of the pictures under proposals was a ‘Wordle’ (Jon spoke about this cool application in a previous post!) [...]