this is a SHAXPIR project
how does it work?

The Big Book of Spy Trivia

  by Bernadette Johnson


(about 215 pages)
53,702
total words
of all the books in our library
27.69%
vividness
of all the books in our library
4.87%
passive voice
of all the books in our library
1.91%
all adverbs
of all the books in our library
0.82%
ly-adverbs
of all the books in our library
1.09%
non-ly-adverbs
of all the books in our library

clippings from this book

We’ve analyzed hundreds of millions of words, from thousands of different authors, training our linguistic models to recognize the most vivid words in the English language… the words that create the most intense sensory experiences: colors, textures, sounds, flavors, and aromas.

Based on our analysis, we’ve scanned through the pages of this book to find the two pages at the extremes, both the most-passive and the most-vivid pages, so that you can compare them side-by-side and see the difference:

MOST PASSIVE PAGE
MOST VIVID PAGE
honey pot is an operation whereby an agent is seduced and blackmailed or otherwise entrapped with sex by a foreign operative. Q: What is a burn notice? A: As ominous as it sounds, the “burn” in burn notice refers to burning documents. If a spy is found to be unreliable, a burn notice is issued and all reports from that spy are destroyed (plus, presumably, the spy is no longer used). EVERYDAY ESPIONAGE TIPS, TRICKS, AND DANGERS Q: Can body language signal when someone is lying? A: We live in what some call a “post-truth society.” What is one to do when they suspect someone of lying? There are signs that may indicate when someone is not being truthful, but none are foolproof. It helps to know a little about a person’s behavior under normal circumstances (i. e. when they aren’t lying) to interpret whether what you think is a sign is just how they normally act. If you want to confront someone about a potential lie but don’t already know them, you can try to make them comfortable (be nice, have them sit in a comfy spot, and ask them if they want anything to drink, for instance). Then you can ask them simple questions you don’t think they would lie about and observe their physical and vocal reactions and mannerisms. A sign of a lie in one person might not be the case in another. People have idiosyncrasies. But some experts suggest that showing multiple red flags is a beach, scales a wall with a grappling hook, tussles with a guard, sneaks into what looks like a silo, sets C-4 explosives on tanks of nitro with a timer, walks out, removes his wetsuit to reveal a pristine white tuxedo and black tie, places a flower in his lapel, walks into a party at a bar, and lights a cigarette just as the explosion goes off. It turns out he blew up a heroin factory. The scene wasn’t in Ian Fleming’s book Goldfinger, which started in the bar. It was likely added by British former SOE officer (during WWII) Paul Dehn, who wrote the SEO training manual and was one of the Goldfinger screenplay cowriters. Believe it or not, a good portion of this story really happened, although the setting was quite different. During WWII, two Dutch agents were trapped behind enemy lines in the Netherlands (which was occupied by Nazi Germany). Queen Wilhelmina (under exile in Britain) sent a team of agents to exfiltrate them with help from MI6 agents Peter Tazelaar, Hazelhoff Roelfzema, and Bob Van der Stok. The agents took a British motor gunboat from Britain, disguised it as a dinghy, and rowed along the shore near the Palace Resort at Scheveningen, where the Nazis had set up headquarters and regularly threw parties on Friday nights. Tazelaar and Roelfzema exited the dinghy and swam to the beach, where Roelfzema helped Tazelaar out of his wetsuit. Underneath, he was wearing a tuxedo. Roelfzema splashed Hennessy XO brandy

emotional story arc

Click anywhere on the chart to see the most significant emotional words — both positive & negative — from the corresponding section of the text…
This chart visualizes the the shifting emotional balance for the arc of this story, based on the emotional strength of the words in the prose, using techniques pioneered by the UVM Computational Story Lab. To create this story arc, we divided the complete manuscript text into 50 equal-sized chunks, each with 1074.04 words, and then we scored each section by counting the number of strongly-emotional words, both positive and negative. The bars in the chart move downward whenever there’s conflict and sadness, and they move upward when conflicts are resolved, or when the characters are happy and content. The size of each bar represents the positive or negative word-count of that section.

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