Chomsky Prose Generator

This application is an aid to writing papers in the style of Noam Chomsky. In 1957, Chomsky claimed that a finite-state machine could not generate the variety of sentences used by English speakers. But this application shows that a finite-state machine can generate the kind of English that Chomsky writes.

To generate Chomskyan prose, click the button for a sentence, a paragraph, or a page.

For more prose, come back to this page and click again.

For hints on how to generate Chomskyan prose, look at the page source of this file. Study the patterns in the lists of introductory phrases, noun phrases, verb phrases, and object phrases. If you want more variety in the generated sentences, get some books or papers by Chomsky and copy more phrases into those four lists. To generate prose in the style of some other author, replace all four lists with phrases written by that author.