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