Emotion Checker

Also Known As:

BRIEF DESCRIPTION

What Is It? The Connotation Checker functions much like a spell-checker or grammar checker. It scans a piece of writing, analyzes it for emotional and other connotative content, then provides graphical and verbal feedback on the emotional impact and human interest values inherent in the piece. (It does not check spelling or grammar.)

How Would I Use It? You would use it much the same way you currently use a spell checker or grammar checker. The Connotation Checker provides a complete connotative interpretation of your written work and suggests solutions to improve its emotional impact and human interest before your audience reads it. The Connotation Checker alerts you to specific passages that are weak, impersonal, lifeless, and boring. Add-ons enable you to compare the emotional impact of your own work with the work of any other writer, such as Hemingway, Nabokov, Plath, Atwood, etc.

[Top]

DETAILED DESCRIPTION AND IMAGES

The Connotation Checker is the connotative equivalent of a grammar or style checker, but it does something far more important and useful. The Connotation Checker will scan an entire piece of written work and provide feedback on how the whole piece feels emotionally, how humanly interesting or boring it is, how personal or impersonal it is, and so on. In effect, this will give the user a predictive indication of how the piece is likely to be received by an audience. Is the piece likely to inspire excitement in an audience? outrage? hope? embarrassment? gratitude? gloom? wonder? anxiety?

If the Connotation Checker indicates that the connotative or emotional effect of the text is not what the user intends, the Connotation Checker advises what the user can do to improve the piece.

The Connotation Checker will be able to analyze the emotional meaning and impact of any kind of text: blogs, essays, novels, short stories, magazine and newspaper articles, advertising copy, poetry. Even song lyrics. Moreover, the Connotation Checker will be capable of providing very detailed analyses.

Users of the Connotation Checker will even be able to compare the emotional or connotative analysis of their own work with the emotional or connotative analysis of the work of their favorite writer, be it Ernest Hemingway or Margaret Atwood or Leonard Cohen.

[Top]

Who will use the Connotation Checker, and why? Anyone who uses a word processor, which comes with a built-in grammar checker. The Connotation Checker will also be available as a stand-alone software product. Anyone writing anything who seeks to enliven his or her work, to make it interesting, to infuse it with life and human interest, will find the Connotation Checker invaluable:

•   Advertising and marketing professionals
•   Bloggers
•   Web site authors
•   Executives and managers
•   Students and instructors
•   Lawyers and consultants
•   Journalists and editors
•   Speech writers
•   Public relations professionals
•   Non-fiction writers such as travel and self-help writers
•   Creative writers, such as novelists, script writers, and lyricists.

[Top]

The Connotation Checker will enable users to measure the interest, effectiveness, power, and persuasiveness of what they write. Built into word processing software, it will function much like familiar spell checker or grammar checker tools. To illustrate, consider the following:

Example 1 (by Judith Butler)

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Now consider this sample:

Example 2 (by Germaine Greer)

Freedom in an unfree world is merely license to exploit. Lip-service to feminism in the developed nations is a handy disguise for the masculinization of power and the feminization of poverty in the emerging nations. If you believe, as I do, that to be feminist is to understand that before you are of any race, nationality, religion, party or family, you are a woman, then the collapse in the prestige and economic power of the majority of women in the world as a direct consequence of western hegemony must concern you. And when you see women denounce cultural imperialism—the women who donned the chador and howled the Americans out of Iran, for example—you should recognize them and their struggle as your own.

Both samples are approximately the same length, grammatically correct, and free of spelling errors. Both were written by intelligent people addressing the same subject.

Whether or not you subscribe to her point of view, however, you would likely agree that Germaine Greer’s piece is far more powerful and interesting than Judith Butler’s.

Why are these two pieces so strikingly different?

The first example is highly abstract and excruciatingly dull. The problem is the vocabulary: structuralist account, relatively homologous, convergence, rearticulation, temporality, structuralist totalities, theoretical objects, contingent sites, inaugurate. These words and phrases may be loaded with weighty intellectual meaning, but they render the text extremely uninteresting.

The second example, on the other hand, is lively, engaging, and colorful. Greer uses words and phrases with strong emotional content: freedom, unfree world, license to exploit, lip-service, feminism, disguise, masculinization of power, feminization of poverty, race, nationality, religion, party, collapse, prestige, denounce, cultural imperialism, howled, Iran, struggle. Moreover, Greer incorporates many references to people: you, I, family, woman, women, Americans, them, their, your own.

Here is how the Connotation Checker, built into word processing software, would analyze and interpret Example 1 (draft screen shot for prototype):

And here is how the Connotation Checker would analyze and interpret Example 2 (draft screen shot for prototype):

The Connotation Checker shows the user that there is much more life in the Germaine Greer piece than in the Judith Butler piece. The Greer piece is much higher in connotative value, more emotionally evocative, and more humanly interesting. However, it could still use some work, the specifics of which are recommended by the Connotation Checker. (A writer might consider the "Recommendations" suggested by the software to be presumptuous. Therefore, the writer will have the option of switching off the "Recommendations" feature.) The above screen shots are representative of only a few of the connotative analyses available to the user of Connotation Checker software.

[Top]

Here is how the Connotation Checker interprets a well-known Beatles song:

Connotation Checker users will also be able to compare their writing with that of famous authors such as Hemingway, Plath, O’Rourke, Atwood, Ondaatje, Woolf, Rushdie, Nabokov, and numerous others—compare, that is, for emotional or connotative impact.