Icon Poet is a writing toy that lets you produce original texts by clicking on different word categories. It is now freeware.

The little gadget on the right demonstrates the basic technique. Click the, then noun, then is. Now click adjective several times. See how it offers replacements? You don't have to settle for the first word it gives you.

The actual program has more categories, but they all work basically this way. Here's a non-functioning screenshot:

Icon Poet has been used in enlightened classrooms to help students learn their grammatical terms. It's also a great cure for writer's block.

But mainly, it's just a fun way to write. If you stay loose and work with its bizarre suggestions, you will soon be pulling poems and paragraphs out of thin air that you would never have written the conventional way.

If you have a Windows computer, run InstallIconPoet.exe to install Icon Poet on your machine. This is version 1.08, which works just like the full commercial version 1.07. The file size is smaller because I removed the copy protection when I made it freeware. It now requires only 1.3 MB of hard drive space, about the size of one photo from a 5 megapixel digital camera. A manual and an uninstaller are included, and it has been found virus-free by current versions of Bit Defender Internet Security, AntiMalware, and McAfee VirusScan.