A while ago, I wrote an emacs ‘reading mode’. It highlights a single sentence at a time, fading the rest of the text into a gentle grey, and a keypress moves onto the next sentence. It retains the familiarity and consistency of normal text layout, but provides additional cues about the extent of the current sentence.
Tonight, I played with the idea of including smarter parsing into this reading mode. The Stanford Parser parses english sentences. It tells you about the grammatical structure (noun phrases, verb phrases, etc) and dependencies between words. This is just about enough to do what I had in mind – a “superfluous word” highlighter. The whole world is absolutely packed full of so many documents with wholly unnecessary words. Ideally, I’d like to just delete the pointless words. But it’s rare for a word to be completely devoid of semantic meaning. So, my compromise is just to highlight those decorative words – adjectival and adverbial modifiers – which are commonly guilty.
Here’s some examples, not completely perfect, but useful nonetheless:
I REALLY want some SUPER TASTY chocolate. The system has been VERY CAREFULLY designed, and will cope admirably with all CONCEIVABLE combinations of circumstances. I wanted to leave my SMALL pond and see HOW I'd fare in a BIG one, with some of the BEST developers in the world. You define HOW you want your data to be structured ONCE, THEN you can use SPECIAL GENERATED source code to EASILY write and read your STRUCTURED data.