Here's the trick. Take a story and pass it through MS Word's Autosummary function, choosing 10 sentences as the length of the summary. Here's what MS Word thought would be a good summary of my story "Under the Canopy:"
Mina ran.
Mina cried.
"Mina. Mina nodded. "Nast!" Mina shrugged. Mina nodded. "Nast!"
Nast nudged Mina. Mina shrugged.
It's silly, of course, to expect a piece of software to summarize fiction, although I imagine somewhere out there, there's a secretary happily summarizing her boss's memos, and not caring or understanding if the summary really was a summary. Said secretary also happily accepts Word's recommendation's for style, formatting, and page setup. "Wow," she thinks, "I can't believe I went to night school to learn stuff. MS Word Rocks! It does everything!"
But this has an unexpectedly poetic feel to it, great alliteration, some repetition, and an oddly un partnered quotation mark, as if (spoilers ahead) Nast's death also left Mina un partnered. I was tempted to add some line breaks, and now I regret taking out a tab on the final line -- was MS Word trying to tell me something? Was the nudge away the left hand margin symbolic of Nast's nudge? I'd like to think that some former poet sold out and went to night school for C++ and slaves away now, delegated to the lowest function of the Word hierarchy of all encompassing functions, trying to impart some art into the thankless job of auto summarizing.
Comments