“We Were Liars” by E. Lockhart Textual Analysis

When asked to think about a book for this assignment, very few came to mind. I always like to think that I enjoy reading, however, there is a short amount of books I have read due to my picky taste. While I always have the resolution to read more books, during quarantine should have been my prime… does one book cause for celebration? This one book was raved about on social media, and still… I was not thoroughly impressed once I finished. With this being said, it is the most recent book I have read, and I was interested while reading it, so I remember quite a good amount in regards to the material.

For this assignment we were to make a word cloud out of the contents of our choice of novel. I chose We Were Liars by E. Lockhard and I was able to find the entire text online, to which I copied and pasted into the generator. While over 600 words did not make the cut, I feel as though the main words were represented in the final product.

Going about playing with the different tools to customize it was fun! My original idea was to make it beach themed, as this is the main setting of the story. There was no image to represent this, and all of the ones I googled were mediocre. I went back to the generators website and saw a tab marked “colorful” in the “shapes” folder.

This is when I found the PERFECT shape for my words, fire! SPOILER ALERT: The group of friends in the novel burn down one of their families buildings on the beach. Once I chose the fire shape, it also changed the colors to orange and red themed hues and my “cloud” was complete!

It’s interesting to note how some of the largest words are names of people and occasionally places. Other than these names, the other large words are just those of regular filler words. This makes sense, as these are widely more common than the use of names and other information. I think the “cloud” encompasses the book pretty well, but there are some major themes that I felt were not captured. For example, each family has their own building on the beach, and they are each referred to by a name. So overall, it did a good job, but there were too many filler words blocking the other important words to make it perfect.

I really love how this whole thing turned out. I hope you enjoy it! :)