Super interesting experiment, Terry. Personally, my eyes don't cope with parsing the verbal information when seeing so many colours. I'd be interested in seeing variations where you only colour e.g. verbs or nouns.
Curious to hear of your (assume automated) approach to this.
I really like this - I love parts of speech, etc. and to highlight them just added a cadence. Have to say, my first thought when I read the title was the Henry Reed poem. Which my 11th grade English teacher loved - primarily because of its extended double entendre!
Nov 5, 2023·edited Nov 7, 2023Liked by Terry Freedman
This was great, and I found myself only reading all the words of each color as a sentence, and then challenged myself to fill in something between all of the same colored words. I also found myself identifying what all of the same colored words were, parts-wise. My mind focused on the colors, not the content. (Maybe that correlates with my left-handedness.) My brain went, "Ohhhhhhhhh colorsssssssssss" and that was it for my brain. The words became secondary until I started thinking about what part each one was. Did I already say this was great? This was great!
The parts (of speech) cause me panic attacks, so this one was stressful. But I did go back and try to read it one color at a time, which did make me curious about the minimum elements required for a story to be understood. Could one tell a story with just nouns and verbs? Please say yes, because that's pretty much how I get by in foreign languages :-|
This reminds me of those examples of those texts whose words have many missing letters or are jumbled but are still readable because our brains make the connections. The colors in your text were obvious at first but then they kinda faded away.
This post was so interesting. I found I could follow the story - kind of - by focusing just on the verbs in green, although it surprised me that you hadn't highlighted 'up' and 'out' - as in 'woke up' and 'knocked out' - hmmm, I'm thinking about that.
Then I went down a layer and concentrated on the words in grey, which gave me more of a sense of the narrative.
My favourite layer of reading, though, was of the lovely adjectives in orange, which gave me a much greater sense of what the story was about even if I couldn't follow it entirely.
A really, really interesting Experiment in style, Terry - thank you so much for a Sunday reading highlight!
(There's a typo in there... you've put 'purposely' instead of 'purposefully'. Just sayin'.)
My 2:37am thoughts? It’s... pretty? I await the ‘analysis’ instalment with interest. I can imagine wasting (spending?) considerable time comparing versions. It would be interesting comparing colour swatches to see how different versions look... hmmm...
Wow, that was most off-putting! I had to skip reading pass the first line the first time, then went back to it so I could fully experience the discomfort...it made for a fractured experience, as my brain was frustrated not to be able to just enjoy reading as well as identifying each colour group. For novelty of feeling out of a very familiar text, I'd say that's a success!
Super interesting experiment, Terry. Personally, my eyes don't cope with parsing the verbal information when seeing so many colours. I'd be interested in seeing variations where you only colour e.g. verbs or nouns.
Curious to hear of your (assume automated) approach to this.
I really like this - I love parts of speech, etc. and to highlight them just added a cadence. Have to say, my first thought when I read the title was the Henry Reed poem. Which my 11th grade English teacher loved - primarily because of its extended double entendre!
I thought it aided the reading, Terry. The green blocks felt like references points. And the story seemed familiar?! 😁
This was great, and I found myself only reading all the words of each color as a sentence, and then challenged myself to fill in something between all of the same colored words. I also found myself identifying what all of the same colored words were, parts-wise. My mind focused on the colors, not the content. (Maybe that correlates with my left-handedness.) My brain went, "Ohhhhhhhhh colorsssssssssss" and that was it for my brain. The words became secondary until I started thinking about what part each one was. Did I already say this was great? This was great!
The parts (of speech) cause me panic attacks, so this one was stressful. But I did go back and try to read it one color at a time, which did make me curious about the minimum elements required for a story to be understood. Could one tell a story with just nouns and verbs? Please say yes, because that's pretty much how I get by in foreign languages :-|
This reminds me of those examples of those texts whose words have many missing letters or are jumbled but are still readable because our brains make the connections. The colors in your text were obvious at first but then they kinda faded away.
First off, I loved the clickbait title! 🤣
This post was so interesting. I found I could follow the story - kind of - by focusing just on the verbs in green, although it surprised me that you hadn't highlighted 'up' and 'out' - as in 'woke up' and 'knocked out' - hmmm, I'm thinking about that.
Then I went down a layer and concentrated on the words in grey, which gave me more of a sense of the narrative.
My favourite layer of reading, though, was of the lovely adjectives in orange, which gave me a much greater sense of what the story was about even if I couldn't follow it entirely.
A really, really interesting Experiment in style, Terry - thank you so much for a Sunday reading highlight!
(There's a typo in there... you've put 'purposely' instead of 'purposefully'. Just sayin'.)
😊
see the episode of Ulysses where he does a virtuoso tour of a whole bunch of English styles. I found it tedious, actually:
https://www.coursehero.com/lit/Ulysses/part-2-episode-14-summary/
My 2:37am thoughts? It’s... pretty? I await the ‘analysis’ instalment with interest. I can imagine wasting (spending?) considerable time comparing versions. It would be interesting comparing colour swatches to see how different versions look... hmmm...
Wow, that was most off-putting! I had to skip reading pass the first line the first time, then went back to it so I could fully experience the discomfort...it made for a fractured experience, as my brain was frustrated not to be able to just enjoy reading as well as identifying each colour group. For novelty of feeling out of a very familiar text, I'd say that's a success!