about
what this is
paste a verse and the page comes back marked like a coach's copy — every rhyme the ear can hear, highlighted by family on ruled paper. it runs entirely in your browser; your verse never leaves your machine, and the browser itself enforces that. no accounts, no feed, no machine that writes bars. a notebook that reads.
the colors are the vowels
this is the part most people miss, so it gets its own heading: the highlighter colors aren't decoration.
every rhyme family's hue comes from its vowel sound — all fifteen vowels of english sit on a color wheel in
phonetic order, so sounds that live near each other in your mouth live near each other on the page.
an ee scheme wears the same family of color in every verse, every song, every artist. the small
strip on a shared card is the whole verse's vowels laid end to end — its color DNA. the project is, in the
end, one idea: seeing how words sound.
whose shoulders
the visual language descends from estelle caswell's vox series rapping, deconstructed — the video that showed millions of people a rhyme scheme for the first time — and the hand-marked verse breakdowns of martin connor, the battle-rap coach whose annotations that video animated. they marked verses by hand, frame by frame. this notebook tries to do their kind of seeing, instantly, for any verse — and it gets things wrong that they wouldn't. the marks are automated analysis, not human judgment; arguing with the page is part of the point, and there's a button for it.
the rules this thing keeps
your verse never leaves this machine · the pen is always the writer's — nothing here writes a bar, ever · corrections you choose to send carry sounds, never words, and never train generative AI · the dictionary is carnegie mellon's, credited on every page it touches. the longer versions live in terms, privacy, and legal.
from the desk
I built this because: I love words, yo.
Plain and simple. Using the right one at the right time is magic, and I wanted to see how the magic works.
This is for everyone who saw that Vox video ten years ago and thought — that's how my brain works, and I want more. This is more.
Heads up: the machine disagrees with your ear sometimes. That's good. Argue with it — that's what the game's all about, and now it has a page where it can all go down.
At the risk of meeting my heroes, this project is dedicated to everyone who makes it their mission to be nice with words:
All the poets, lyricists, authors, storytellers, and — especially — the MCs who use words to color our lives and reflect back something beautiful.
Thank you.
say hi
alonzo@pastthemargin.app. a human reads it.