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Compare sentence length distributions of famous authors

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Re: Compare sentence length distributions of famous authors

#5
Tried it on Brave New World, which contains this massive 250-worder near the start (but it turns out the rest is pretty typical):

> Still leaning against the incubators he gave them, while the pencils scurried illegibly across the pages, a brief description of the modern fertilizing process; spoke first, of course, of its surgical introduction–"the operation undergone voluntarily for the good of Society, not to mention the fact that it carries a bonus amounting to six months' salary"; continued with some account of the technique for preserving the excised ovary alive and actively developing; passed on to a consideration of optimum temperature, salinity, viscosity; referred to the liquor in which the detached and ripened eggs were kept; and, leading his charges to the work tables, actually showed them how this liquor was drawn off from the test-tubes; how it was let out drop by drop onto the specially warmed slides of the microscopes; how the eggs which it contained were inspected for abnormalities, counted and transferred to a porous receptacle; how (and he now took them to watch the operation) this receptacle was immersed in a warm bouillon containing free-swimming spermatozoa–at a minimum concentration of one hundred thousand per cubic centimetre, he insisted; and how, after ten minutes, the container was lifted out of the liquor and its contents re-examined; how, if any of the eggs remained unfertilized, it was again immersed, and, if necessary, yet again; how the fertilized ova went back to the incubators; where the Alphas and Betas remained until definitely bottled; while the Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons were brought out again, after only thirty-six hours, to undergo Bokanovsky's Process.

Re: Compare sentence length distributions of famous authors

#6
Heh. For fun I put in a bit of "Within a Budding Grove" (one of the Proust books [1]) and it's almost entirely in the yellow region, even with my bad copy-paste job that chops up sentences by accident. Proust is fun to read, but it took me a while to get the way he talks.

[1] https://www.planetebook.com/free-ebooks/within-a-budding-gro...

Re: Compare sentence length distributions of famous authors

#7
Sentence length is pretty arbitrary considering that in many cases the choice of whether to insert a sentence-ending full stop is arbitrary. Almost any period can be replaced with a semicolon. And what should you do with a clause that starts with "however"? Should it be a separate sentence, or attached to the previous one with a comma or a semicolon? So I've never considered sentence length to be very meaningful.

Re: Compare sentence length distributions of famous authors

#10

Is it a valid comparison if they're comparing sentence length of translations of works originally written in other languages? For example, Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha and Plato's Republic.

What does "valid comparison" mean?

If the intent is to help potential readers to estimate the difficulty of the book, then that's useful.

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