Nice post by Russell about ‘Lexical Density’, which sounds much more scary than it is…
It got me thinking, all this stuff is all very well to analyse in retrospect, so what about a real-time speech analyser that monitors your lexical density, fog index, criminal overuse of words and phrases, etc. Perhaps something mounted in a pair of glasses with LEDs so you can modify your speech on-the-fly…
Steve Jobs would get a red light to warn him of ‘overbooming’, Bill would get a ‘stop being so boring’ light twinkling away to encourage him to turn it on.
Actually they’d be rubbish. I’d just end up with an ‘overuse of word: stuff’ light strobing in my eye all the time.
I was chatting about this with Ben today. Well, not quite this. But thinking how handy it would be to have a live tagcloud that analyses your presentations on the fly. Or your email. Just so you could keep an eye on your linguistic habits. Or maybe to discover how you’re feeling by observing what you’re saying.
Or one on your iPhone so you can curb your swearing when chatting to your Mum…