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 Ling 131: Language & Style
 

 Topic 6 (session A) - Style and Style variation > Authorial and text style > Task C

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Session Overview
Style Variation in USA
Language Variation: Dialect
Language Variation: Register
Style Variation in a poem
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Style: What is it?
Authorial and text style
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Authorial and Text Style

Task C- Sentence-length variation from the average

One obvious reason for the lack of correlation between the sentence-length and our perceptions of the style of the Lawrence passage has to do with how much variation there is from the average as we move from sentence to sentence through the passage. In some writing, each sentence (or most sentences) has a word-length reasonably close to the average for the passage. But in other examples of writing, individual sentence lengths might vary dramatically from the average for the passage. That is what we will explore in the next task.

Look back at the word-counts that you did for the individual sentences for each passage and compare them with the averages for those passages. How much did the sentences of each passage vary from the average?

This variation from an average is what the statisticians call "Standard Deviation" from that average. Standard deviation can be calculated mathematically, and the greater the variation the higher the standard deviation figure is. But you probably won't want to get involved in more complex maths, and as the passages are small we have produced some representations in the form of a graph. The sentence numbers of the relevant text are displayed on the horizontal axis. For convenience we have represented the Ellegård Norm as a straight line across the graph.

graphical representation of stadard deviation in the passages


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