Seven controls, seven personas.
128 personalities. Every combination of high and low controls has its own personality, and every point in between is a blend of them: the card names the strongest and shows what it leans toward.
How the text changes. The text is analysed once. Each control has devices that raise it and devices that lower it (): moves of whole sentences, rephrasings of a phrase (the night was dark and stormy; the lamps' flame; there was a man wending; our scene lies in London), and words from the dictionary for the same sense (plainly for evidently, going for wending, the broader term for the Abstracter). A word is only exchanged when the surrounding text settles which of its senses is meant. Each device has as many chances to act as the text gives it; as the target moves away from where the text stands, more of them switch on, one at a time, and the personality at the target decides how each is worded. At the text's own position nothing changes.
What may change and what may not. Every inserted word comes from the text itself, the dictionary, or the frame vocabulary, and the changes view marks which. No event, motive or particular is invented; tense, who did what, and the propositions themselves stay as they are; quoted speech is never touched; the text's own questions and judgments are never removed.
What a frame does change. Some devices keep the proposition but change the stance around it: who vouches for it, how settled it sounds, how much weight it is given. "We find that" adds a narrator who found it; "as it turned out" and "so far" change how settled it is; "the point is that" changes its salience. "What changed" labels every device by kind and marks stance changes; "Keep who vouches" turns the stance devices off. The persona names are playful; the operations named on the card are what actually happens.
Questions. The Questioner's questions come in three kinds, labelled in "What changed": a closing question that only gives the text the form of inquiry; a question about a particular act in the text; and an evidential test, which turns an uncertainty the text states ("we do not know whether…") into the question of what would settle it.
Three layers, kept apart. The seven controls are expressive devices: procedural immediacy, concrete particularisation, narrator participation and the rest. They are not the dimensions of Knowledge, Purpose and Action. Particulars are not knowledge as a whole, the narrator is not purpose as a whole, immediacy is one way of representing action. The Experiment panel keeps the passage's situation (what is known and by whom, what the passage is for, what it does) beside each record, untouched by the engine. The nine descriptive fields (Scope, Access, Warrant, Alternatives, Agency, Reflexive reach, Consequence, Reader relation, Presentation) are for judging the result. A device's list of fields it may move is a hypothesis, and the marks you make are the judgments.
Where a control has nothing to work on, it does not move, and the green bands on the controls show this before you drag. The chips under the cube say, for each control you have moved, whether its devices acted, are still waiting further along, have nothing in this text to work on, or were withheld by the grammar check.
Dictionary.
Library.
Credits. Parser: compromise 14.14.0 by Spencer Kelly (MIT licence), rules and a lexicon, no model. Dictionary: Open English WordNet 2024 (CC BY 4.0). Texts: openings of public-domain novels and essays from Project Gutenberg, two short texts written for this demonstration, and the Prop Fiction model paragraph. Nothing on this page sends your text anywhere.
Using the cube. Drag the cross in any direction. Use the wheel, or hold Shift while dragging, to move it toward or away from you. Drag empty space to turn the cube; double-click to reset it. Click anywhere to place the target there; click a corner to jump to that personality; click an axis name to show another control. Arrow keys and [ ] move the target along the axes. Generate gives a new take at the same point; with an empty box it writes the library paragraph for the personality you are in.
State the passage's situation, record points, and mark which descriptive fields you judge to have moved. The engine does not read the situation; it is kept with each record. The devices' suggested fields are hypotheses for you to confirm.