In language teaching, a cloze test is a test in which words are removed from a text and replaced with spaces. The task of the learner is to fill each space with the missing word or a suitable word.
I recently read of a company that developed a font with holes in it. After some research it was decided that a certain quantity of carefully placed holes could be left in printed text while readability was maintained.
The concept struck me as inane. Is there really an impending ink shortage in a world where publishers of all types have or will soon abandon print altogether for Internet and digital media?
Targeting print media with new cost-saving technologies is a bit like inventing a better payphone, the payphone being a once omnipresent technology that will survive mostly on the margins of society. I don’t know if print media is doomed to a fate like the payphone, but I would think that any business whose income relies on money made from printed material is headed for hard times.
Nevertheless, in the interest of saving ink I have an alternate proposal. I say we print books with random words omitted. Algorithms must exist which could be used to omit the least necessary words — that is, words most readers could assume through context rather than by literally being included in print. Research has been done into the readability of jumbled text but I would be interested in studies into the readability of texts with words omitted.
This is, of course, the stuff of poetry. Is succinctness of expression something we can trust to an algorithm? It could be fun to try.
