(You can click on the image above to see it larger in a separate window, if you’d like)
Source:
Jessica Wohl. “McDonald’s not loving 1Q results: Sales, profit miss expectations; CEO says improvements are on front burner.” Chicago Tribune. 23 April 2014: Business, 3.
The prompt:
Inventory is a method of analysis and classification that consists of isolating and listing the vocabulary of a pre-existing work according to parts of speech. Choose a newspaper article or passage from a newspaper article and “inventory” the nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, articles, etc. Bonus points for creative presentation of your final lists.
http://www.foundpoetryreview.com/blog/oulipost-23-inventory/
Author note:
I’m afraid that I did not understand or know what to do with this prompt at all.
So, I used Excel to create lists of the nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in the article. Then I deleted all of the cells that had proper nouns in them, and sorted the noun column alphabetically. This spaced things out in an interesting way, which you can also see or download below. I copied all of the words into Wordle and played around with the various settings to create a word cloud that I think resembles a potato or perhaps a patty.
