The Stack

One thing about the keyword-highlighting system: it makes it easy to pick the keywords out, and therefore easy to take them out of context. When I see a paragraph of descriptive text with a few blue nouns in it, it’s a foregone conclusion that I’m going to type in those nouns, so I find myself often doing so before I’ve read the text around them. Entering an abandoned cabin, the first thing I notice is the word “skeleton”. Clearly a significant thing to find! Typing it in, I get the response “The skeleton, mounted on the wall, makes a large diamond,” — what? — “and must have once belonged to some flat, manta ray creature…” Not at all what I had been imagining from the word “skeleton” alone. Only at this point do I look back at the room text and notice that it was described from the first as a manta ray skeleton. It’s just that the words “manta ray” weren’t blue, and didn’t stand out.