A first look at phrase length distribution

Here’s a sentence length vs. frequency distribution graph for Chesterton, Poe, and Swift, plus Time of Punishment.

Phrase length distribution

A few observations:

  • Take everything with a grain of salt. There are features here that might be artifacts of parsing and so on.
  • That said, it’s interesting that Poe seems to fancy short interjections more than Chesterton does (not as much as I do, though).
  • Swift seems to have a more heterogeneous style in terms of phrase lengths, compared with Chesterton’s more marked preference for relatively shorter phrases.
  • Swift’s average sentence length is about 31 words, almost twice Chesterton’s 18 (Poe’s is 21, and mine is 14.5). I’m not sure how reasonable that looks.
  • Time of Punishment‘s choppy distribution is just an artifact of the low number of samples.