#lexical density

[ejzah]

Me: I love language and grammar!

Later Language Development: We’ll see about that.

Analyzing a text’s lexical density sounds fun in theory until you confuse yourself so much you no longer remember the difference between an adverb and a preposition.

[bethturnage]

Ooh! A Question about Lexical Density

Ooh! A Question about Lexical Density

What are the possible factors that lessens the lexical density in writing??

A question in a comment? Yes! I was so tickled that I decided to devote an entire blog post to it. And I won’t just tell you. I’ll show you, and to do so I’ll pick on my of my favorite authors Kevin Hearne whose first thousand words of Shattered:The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book 7 is the perfect case in point.

You: Wait,…

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[bethturnage]

The Craft of #Writing: Beware the Adverb Nazis.

The Craft of #Writing: Beware the Adverb Nazis.

Adverbs

Pro-Writing Aid, an online program that analyzes your writing and gives you recommendations to improve it.As I was looking at a report on a piece it gave the number of adverbs and recommended that I remove three.

I must have missed this before but I do tend to use the old editor, instead of the report on the new editor.

Hmm.

With a word count and a number of allowed adverbs in hand, I…

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[theorigamiphoenix]

Here’s a graph showing the lexical densities of most Homestuck characters. Lexical density is a rough measure of word variety that compares the number of unique content words to the total number of words. It roughly correlates to how sophisticated a speaker sounds to those who speak a similar amount.. If they’re above the blue line, they’re more likely to sound fancy, Below it, less likely. This measure is very sensitive to the size of the text as quite apparent in the graph. The smaller the corpus size, the larger the LD will be as fewer of the less common words will be repeated.

The blue line is a rough fit line based on perceptions and the large black outline marks the main cluster of characters. Within this outline there is a core cluster of the “most typical” characters in terms of corpus size.

The way to make a better fit line would be to take random, non-consecutive selections of words from several characters and calculate their LDs at each sample size, but I don’t know how to do that automatically at the moment.

[theorigamiphoenix]

Random fact: Dave Strider uses a bigger range of vocabulary than the first Animorphs book, which are of similar length. His lexical density (a ratio of content words to total words) is 12.9% while The Invasion’s is 9.2%.

Then, Animorphs was made for a younger audience than Homestuck, so it’s expected.