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What to Expect in the Preview Tour
At the bottom of this page is the
"BEGIN PREVIEW TOUR" link. But before you take the Preview Tour, you may wish to
review the quick summaries of emotional language reference tools, provided at our Home Page and our FAQ Page.
If you are short of time, you can still complete the whole Preview Tour in 5 or
6 minutes.
The Preview Tour is simple and
straightforward. It takes you through eight short "point-and-click" ballots that
let you evaluate the various emotional language reference tools. They are:
- Demographics
- Emotional Dictionary
- Emotional Thesaurus
- "He Meant/She Meant"
Emotional Dictionary
- Emotional Character/Person Namer
- Emotional Product/Business Namer
- Connotation Checker (Emotion Checker)
- Emotional Language Translator
You can complete each short ballot in only
a few seconds, and the whole Preview Tour in a few minutes.
IMPORTANT: As you go through the Preview Tour, you will
almost certainly be highly skeptical, possibly even dismissive, about emotional language
reference tools. . . . How could they be created? Who would use an emotional dictionary or
an emotional thesaurus? Won't these tools kill the art of writing?
Consider the following three points:
- Emotional language reference tools
are language reference tools only – just like ordinary dictionaries
and thesauruses. They are not intended as panaceas to "save" bad writing. Any
writer can make abusive use of a dictionary, thesaurus, or any other language reference
tool. (If you don’t remember Spiro Agnew’s speeches, ask an older English
teacher!) But that doesn’t preclude the usefulness of language reference tools to
everyone else.
Consider the following dire predictions of bygone days about the effects of
innovation on the arts:
- Radio and recordings will kill the art of
live music performance
- Movies will kill the writing and
performance of plays
- Television will kill the movies
- Electric drills and saws will kill the art
of sculpture
- Electronic rhyming dictionaries will kill
poetry
- Spell checkers and grammar checkers will
kill original prose style
The tools you will see in this Preview
Tour, such as the Emotional Dicionary and Connotation Checker, are only
reference tools, like the standard denotative dictionary you use every day. In
using any reference tool, the writer makes all final decisions about word choice
and word order.
- Chaucer, Shakespeare, Marlowe and others
wrote all of their masterpieces before the first English dictionary was published. But
that does not mean dictionaries are useless. (Otherwise, Merriam-Webster and
Oxford University Press would have gone out of business long ago!) Few writers today would
seriously ask the question, "What use is a dictionary?" As for the thesaurus,
here’s Constance Hale, in Sin and Syntax: "If you can’t be bothered
to pick up a thesaurus, you are not a prose stylist. You are a hack." (p. 18).
Worldwide, there has always been a strong demand for language reference tools.
- In the Preview Tour, you will see some
examples that will strike you as weird and perplexing. ("What? A pumpkin and a
Volkswagen Beetle evoke similar emotional responses?") That’s because
connotative language reference tools are all about emotional meaning, not objective
meaning. The examples you will see in the Preview Tour come from real people.
You may not agree with them. Nevertheless, they were not generated by a computer
program – they reflect the real feelings of real people.
For each language reference tool, a brief
summary of its functions and uses is provided. You can then "vote", based on the
brief summary. Or, if you would like more information before voting, a full description is
also provided. The Preview Tour includes images of sample screen shots and page layouts of
each emotional language reference tool.
YOUR REWARDS: When you complete the Preview Tour, you gain
access to the following two "rewards":
- The password to the Preview
Results Web Site—results of all the voting to date.
- The Web's Most Useful Resource
Page for Writers: 800 books and links for writers, indexed and alphabetized.
To begin the Preview Tour, please click on
the link below.
Begin
Preview Tour (The
first ballot is "Demographics".) |
