I chose to create a word cloud for The Adventure of the Speckled Band using Voyant and removed stop words to make my cloud more accurate and worthwhile. I prefer Voyant over Wordle as I feel it’s easier to navigate. I chose Speckled Band because it was my favorite of all the Sherlock Holmes stories we’ve read so far.

Naturally, the word “Holmes” appeared the most, for a grand total of 55 times. “Ventilator” came in at 14 as the ventilator played a crucial role in the story, allowing for the snake to do its killing. “Room” was an important word as well, as the story focused on the significance of people dying in that specific room in the house. “Bed” falls into that category as well. Those were the expected occurrences as one simply cannot compose a summary of the story without those words.

As for the surprise, the word “suddenly” appeared 9 times in the story. That’s a lot for a single adverb. To put that into contrast, the word “death” appears 11 times, only 2 more. Death is a central idea in the story. However, the word “suddenly” provides for great suspense in a story, especially a mystery. Arthur Conan Doyle, as an author, must keep his readers interested and engaged in the story and words like “suddenly” create that quick moment of a thrill for the reader.

Words like “room” and “rooms” and “window” and “windows” can always be considered as one when analyzing a cloud like mine for better results. Overall, it was a very straightforward cloud that met expectations. Names always appear often, as was the case here. It’s amazing how none of the words in the title of the story appear in the cloud; I would think that’d be the case with most stories.

It was interesting to see how this text came out and I believe word clouds can definitely be a useful tool under the right circumstances.