an email / discussion forum productivity tool: a visually guided (manual) meaning extraction (more inside …)

Question

I am looking for a software which could help me to write quality replies to a poorly worded/structured or otherwise complex emails/forum messages.

The tool should allow to graphically break (manually of course, though some simple automatic would be handy) the original email/message into separate logical parts (paragraphs, etc). Once the original text is split into logical pieces, I can then go and add my comments to each part, as to “what is the author trying to state/ask here”. After that, I can reply to what I think an author is really asking/stating, rather than to reply to big “raw” chunks of text.

So it would be similar to a “review” functionality which exists in Microsoft Word, but with an emphasis not on the iterative review process, but on a visually guided extraction of the meaning and then addressing that meanings.

I think a tool like that should boost my email/online forums productivity.

Any directions and comments are welcome.

Answer 1

Making sense of someone else's poorly structured writing is no different from revising prose that you've written yourself. Were this proposed software published, it would be used by professional writers everywhere.

Unfortunately, after a few decades, spelling checkers still suffer from random red underlines; grammar checkers are even worse at reading your mind; we can't guess at how bad this would be.

So just copy-paste the words around, like playing Tetris, until meanings and patterns start to emerge. This is how millions have revised drafts, ever since the original MacWord.