[1] The algorithm starts by printing a number of consecutive words (or letters) from the source text.
Considering that words and phrases tend to appear in specific grammatical contexts, the resulting text usually seems correct grammatically, and if the source text is uniform in style, the result appears to be of similar style and subject, and takes some effort on the reader's side to recognize as not genuine.
Brian Hayes discussed a Travesty algorithm in Scientific American in November 1983.
"Hugh Kenner and Joseph O'Rourke of Johns Hopkins University discussed their frequency table-based Travesty generator for microcomputers in BYTE in November 1984.
[3] Murray Lesser offered a compiled BASIC version in the magazine in July 1985,[4] in September 1985 Peter Wayner offered a version that used tree data structures instead of frequency tables,[5] and in December 1985 Neil J. Rubenking offered a version written in Turbo Pascal that stored frequency information in a B-tree.