 The reader had the liberty to insert pauses and dictate tone, making the act of reading a significantly more subjective activity than it is today.However, the lack of spacing also led to some ambiguity because a minor discrepancy in word parsing could give the text a different meaning.For example, a phrase written in "scriptio continua" as "collectamexiliopubem" may be interpreted as "collectam ex Ilio pubem", meaning "a people gathered from Troy", or "collectam exilio pubem", "a people gathered for exile".