Word Clouds as GOTCHA!s

Word clouds are fun. It’s the most obvious kind of “analysis” you can do with unstructured text data. But I don’t like how they are sometimes used as a “gotcha!” As in “Ha! You use this word way too much!” Or “Ha! By using these words a lot and not using these words as much, we can see that your priorities are all screwed up!” Sheer word-counting is easy enough to do, but it’s not very insightful.