STYLE🗜VISE is a training program designed to goad writers toward more interesting syntax.
The syntax of the sentence 'I am a chair.' can be thought of as its part-of-speech sequence: a pronoun, a present tense verb, an article, a singular noun, and then terminal punctuation. Style🗜Vise has read hundreds of thousands of sentences (extracted from the Project Gutenberg corpus as well as Amazon review data), and it knows what part-of-speech sequences are common and which are rare. To get praise (👍) from Style🗜Vise, you have to write a sentence that avoids the most common patterns. As you write, however, Style🗜Vise's restrictions will tighten so that you must avoid not just the most common syntax patterns but also rarer and rarer ones. If you bore Style🗜Vise by failing to do so, you'll lose one of your 10 lives (💖). If you run out of lives, you'll have to start over.
Style🗜Vise is one of a series of "progymnasmata" that aim to repurpose the techniques of Natural Language Processing to push the human writer into productively uncomfortable and unfamiliar positions. It is a more gamified and sadistic elaboration of a program I described here.
A web-based version can be tested here. (It is a bit slow to load, and there can be some disruptive lag---something I hope to fix.) However, I prefer the command line interface version, also in this repository. To interact with STYLE🗜VISE via the command line:
python Stylevise.py
The CLI version has certain advantages over a full-fledged GUI. Interactions with the program are easily recorded (output by default to sv_output.txt). Since developing an interface with cmd is less fuss than making a GUI, it is also easier to change. The CLI version also remembers what the user has written in previous sessions and demands that they differ from those sentences as well. There is also a certain aesthetic charm in the way that a CLI's minimalism focuses attention on the dyadic interaction between human and computer. And, without all the fuss of sending queries to and fro, the CLI app should run a bit more quickly and reliably.
Because the CLI uses the cmd module, it is possible to cycle through previous commands (on my Mac, by pressing ↑).
For convenience, the output file and initial difficulty level can be set via the command line, e.g.:
python Stylevise.py -o anotheroutput.txt -l 2
The online demo version uses SpaCy's en_core_web_sm model. Running locally, both the CLI and GUI versions will first look for the en model before defaulting to en_core_web_sm. The en model probably works better, so I recommend using it.
Described in a conference talk, "Language Models and 'Models of Experience,'" Vilém Flusser and his "Languages," Vilém Flusser Archive, June 2020.