Experiments in style Extra

A look behind the scenes or under the hood or -- well, you know what I mean

Greetings!

A few days ago I wrote and scheduled another Experiments in Style post. If you haven’t discovered these articles yet, here’s the lowdown: I’ve taken a very simple story and rewritten or reimagined it in all sorts of ways. So far, there are 75 versions. Coo-ey! Here’s the index.

Anyway, yesterday I decided that I didn’t like the version I’d written and scheduled, so I unscheduled it. Hopefully, the profound disappointment with which this news will be greeted by my hordes of subscribers will be somewhat ameliorated by the present article, in which I look at how I created the Breathless, TV Reporter and ROT13 versions. Prepare to be amazed. Usually, these ‘Extra’ posts are for paid subscribers, so don’t say I never give you anything.

But enough of this persiflage! On with the article.

Breathless and TV Reporter versions

When I was around 4 years old, my mother took me to the doctor because I’d suddenly developed a limp and a facial tic. I think I vaguely remember this. My mother was panic-stricken because she thought I’d been felled by some sort of nervous ailment. The doctor saw me and burst out laughing.

“There’s nothing wrong with him”, he said. “He’s obviously seen someone in the street like that and is copying them.”

Likewise, the secret of the Breathless, TV Reporter and other styles — if it even is a secret — is that I can’t help picking up on certain characteristics and repeating or exaggerating them. I’m not sure I can offer any deep insights here, except to say that it all comes down to observation.

The other aspect is that some activities and professions have particular ways of speaking. It may not be noticeable very much on an everyday level, but it certainly is if you apply the “wrong” style so to speak. In the following clip, the motor sport commentator Murray Walker turns his attention to snooker.

The ROT13 version

ROT13 is a way to encode text. It replaces each letter in the text by another letter that's 13 letters away from it. This version was suggested to me by

Mark R DeLong

.

The first thing I did was to copy and paste the original version into Word on a Windows computer. There I selected all the text and used SHIFT-F3 to change it all to upper case, because upper case is a bit harder to read than lower case or sentence case. I didn’t want to make it easy for people!

Next, I used Find and Replace to get rid of the paragraph marks (^p) so that the story would be just one block of text. Then I got rid of commas and quotation marks in the same way. I also changed “17%” to “seventeen percent”.

The next step was to put all or most of the letters into five letter blocks, to make it harder to decipher. After all, if you see a single letter, it would be easy to tell that it was “I”. Here’s how I did that, and how you can do it if you wish to, and if you don’t get out much:

In Word, press Alt+F11 to open the Visual Basic Editor.

Click Insert > Module to add a new module.

Paste the following VBA code into the module:

Sub GroupFiveLetters()
    Dim text As String
    Dim result As String
    Dim i As Long
    
    text = Selection.Text
    text = Replace(text, " ", "")
    
    For i = 1 To Len(text) Step 5
        result = result & Mid(text, i, 5) & " "
    Next i
    
    Selection.Text = Trim(result)
End Sub

Close the Visual Basic Editor.

To assign the macro to a button:

• Click File > Options > Quick Access Toolbar

• Under "Choose commands from", select "Macros"

• Select "GroupFiveLetters" and click "Add"

• Click "Modify" to choose an icon and name for the button

• Click "OK" to save changes

To use the macro, select the text you want to group and click the macro button. The text will be organized into five-letter chunks separated by spaces.This macro removes existing spaces, groups the text into five-letter chunks, and adds spaces between them. It works with any length of text and handles leftover characters at the end.

The final step was to encode the text. To do so, I ran the macro described above, and copied and pasted the resulting text into this ROT13 tool.

I hope you found that interesting, if a bit geeky! Thanks for reading.

Terry