Michael Rosen, on this week’s Word of Mouth, managed to snatch a brief interview with a young man who is very much in demand these days.
16-year-old Nick D’Aloisio is the latest web whiz kid, the author of an app capable of summarising a 2,500 word article into a few bullet points, easy to read on the smallest screen.
Michael was worried that in this world of short attention spans that might mean nobody would ever read the original authored effort, but the young man had a ready answer to this. With so much content available we all need help, guidance towards those things which we really want to read, & so this app will help us make sure that we make best use of our time.
As I understood it, the app works by assigning a linguistic score to each sentence of the content to decide the order of importance, & then just reproduces or abbreviates the original. So it is not a magic algorithm for précis, which in our day we had to learn as part of English Language lessons; précis had the advantage of testing not just your comprehension but also training you in the art of concise, elegant writing.
Todays teenagers, brought in to discuss the art of txtng abbreviation, enjoyed hearing of some of the abbreviations & acronyms familiar to 1950s teenagers but were shocked by the ‘filth’ of BURMA – as was I. We knew it in the slightly more ambiguous form of Be Upstairs Ready My Angel.
At least he didn’t tell them about NORWICH, possibly because that would reveal we were also not above misspellings – strictly speaking it should have been KORWICH, or possibly KnORWICH
