Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Compare sentence length distributions of famous authors

sentence-length.netlify.app

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 21 posts

Re: Compare sentence length distributions of famous authors

#11

Post by pmiller2 »

doubleunplussed wrote: post #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 menti…

That becomes a lot easier to read, and more typical, if you mentally replace the semicolons with periods.

Re: Compare sentence length distributions of famous authors

#13

Post by forgotmypw17 »

canjobear wrote: post #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.

>in many cases the choice of whether to insert a sentence-ending full stop is arbitrary

only if you ignore the logical meaning of the words and the meaning of their particular grouping.

Re: Compare sentence length distributions of famous authors

#15

Post by 8bitsrule »

pmiller2 wrote: post #11
doubleunplussed wrote: post #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 menti…

That becomes a lot easier to read, and more typical, if you mentally replace the semicolons with periods.

Yep. The readability index drops from 140 to 15 (high school) !!

Re: Compare sentence length distributions of famous authors

#16

Post by pmiller2 »

8bitsrule wrote: post #15
pmiller2 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That becomes a lot easier to read, and more typical, if you mentally replace the semicolons with periods.

Yep. The readability index drops from 140 to 15 (high school) !!

That makes sense, considering how Brave New World is somewhat commonly assigned in high schools.

Re: Compare sentence length distributions of famous authors

#18

Post by mariusor »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #2

I was disappointed not to see Paradise Lost by John Milton. His sentences are some of the longest I have ever come across.

You can find Paradise Lost as an ebook at Standard Books: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/john-milton/paradise-lost

From a couple of stanzas in Book I, it looks like it's considered to be pretty difficult. :)

Personally I would have been more curious about authors that are known for their stylistic transgressions when it comes to text comprehensibility. Joyce and "Ulysses" come to mind.

Re: Compare sentence length distributions of famous authors

#19

Post by mkay313 »

This reminds me of an app I wrote a few years ago when learning R: https://mzgw.shinyapps.io/book-recommendation/

My friend needed a way to determine the Flesch-Kincaid readability score for a selected paragraph, and was using Microsoft Word for that. I wrote a script to automatically parse the scores for all txt files provided, then started to wonder how different books fared in that aspect, how readability scores map to language proficiency levels, and what can be told about the book in general using simple analysis tools. It was a fun project but the readability scores were far from expected — eg I hate Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and always find it frustrating to read but the readability score is actually not that low.

Re: Compare sentence length distributions of famous authors

#20

Post by wattenberger »

I probably need to add more context to the page, but I want to specify that my intention with this tool wasn't that long sentence == bad. I was inspired by this image:

https://twitter.com/misscrisp/status/1202792895448662016

It's really interesting how different authors play with the rhythm of their sentences - one of the best ones on here is The Raven, with very short sentences interspersed with longer ones.

Post reply on HN