Yesterday, I showed how you could customize the appearance of the parsing window to show only the specific information you want for each word parsed. But that’s just the beginning of what you can do with the parsing window. What if you don’t want parsing information for every word you select?

For example, let’s say you’re using a grammar like Basics of Biblical Greek which does not even begin teaching the Greek verb until Chapter 15 (roughly equivalent to the start of a second semester). You want to reinforce your knowledge of the nouns you’ve been learning by trying to translate relatively simple passages from the Gospel of John. Yet even the simplest passages contain verbs, and you need help knowing how to translate those. You want to select your passage and get a parsing window which only displays the parsing information for the verbs, thereby providing the help you need while forcing you to deal with the nouns from memory.

Once you’ve selected your passage and clicked the Parse button on the Resource palette, use the keyboard shortcut Command-T to access the various display settings.

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Change the Parse pop-up menu near the top of the dialog from All words to Parts of speech. Now click the checkboxes at the bottom of the dialog for the parts of speech you want to be displayed. In this case, we’ll just check Verb. Your parsing window should now look something like this:

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Cool and useful as this is, the Parsing window offers even greater power. Look for more in an upcoming post.