Voice Signal Tool
Some artists work in compression. For example, John O'Donohue can say, "The soul awakens slowly, because it has no need of hurry" and you receive a complete moral stance toward time, patience, being. It's dense. You can unpack it indefinitely. The voice and the morality are fused in every sentence.
Some artists work in duration. Ernest Hemingway can't do compression. Or won't. His morality is anti-declarative. It only exists in the doing. Santiago doesn't explain why he fights the fish. He just fights. The meaning emerges from witnessed action across time. The voice is present immediately, but the moral scaffolding only crystallizes through the reader's sustained attention.
The Voice Signal Tool catches one kind of distinctiveness: lexical surprise. Unusual word choice, surprising vocabulary, semantic frontier-walking.
Examples
Ernest Hemingway wrote:
"In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves."
Signal level
Words analyzed: 126
Here's an evaluation of your text
"This voice employs a distinctive repetitive, almost hypnotic rhythm built on simple conjunctions ('and') that creates a deceptively plain surface masking deeper emotional undercurrents. The deliberately sparse, observational tone combined with the accumulating, almost biblical cadence of clauses creates a voice that's both understated and deeply memorable. The choice to end with that haunting image of the 'road bare and white except for the leaves' demonstrates a masterful control of pacing and emotional resonance that few writers achieve."
A journalist wrote:
"Yes, it seems to be all over for the US but the crying, unless Nobel Prize winner and Energy Secretary Dr. Steven Chu has anything to say about it. In a desperate attempt to play catch up, President Obama has lavished money on alternative energy, virtually, since the day he arrived in office. His stimulus package included $167 billion for the industry, enough to move hundreds of projects out of college labs and into production. However, in the ultimate irony of the bill, much of the money went to manufacturers in other parts of the world that are already bringing viable products to market. Look no further than South Korea's LG, which received $160 million to build batteries for the Volt. Also, Finland's Fisker, which scored $528 million to refurbish an abandoned GM Pontiac and Saturn plant in Joe Biden's home state of Delaware in order to build its hybrid electric Karma vehicle."
Signal level
Words analyzed: 152
Here's an evaluation of your text
"The voice shows personality through dramatic flourishes like 'all over for the US but the crying' and 'ultimate irony,' along with pointed political observations that suggest a skeptical, somewhat cynical perspective. However, much of the prose falls into conventional journalistic patterns with standard policy reporting language, preventing it from reaching full distinctiveness."
This tool is just one dimension of the technology that supports Selflet's development. Learn more →