In Learning Module 3 and in Learning Module 4, we started going over style. Style, for our purposes, is defined as “Using certain kinds of sentences and words that serve the your and your audience’s values, expectations, and goals.” We talked about voice, tone, translingualism, word choice, and more so far.
I’ll be looking at your growth as stylists in the Literacy Narrative Revision, but won’t be grading harshly for it. Please experiment and try new things out with your words and sentences! I will never penalize you for that, especially early on.
Now, we are going to spend a little time going over sentences this week, and the way I like to start with this is to just focus on how long and short your sentences tend to be.
How long sentences are can have a range of rhetorical effects. Let’s check out what your lengths tend to be and what those rhetorical effects might be.
Task
First, Open up your Literacy Narrative first draft (or, if you want, your revision in-progress).
Second, let’s see your sentence length average and variance.
You can use Microsoft Word to do this.
a. Go to File>Options (make sure you use scroll bar all the way to right to scroll to bottom)>Proofing.
b. Under “When correcting spelling…”, check the box labeled “Show readability statistics.”
c. After that, go to “Review” on top menu bar and click “Spelling & Grammar” on far right.
d. Some box (or a few) might come up about conciseness or something else, click “Ignore once.”
e. Then another box will appear called “Readability Statistics.” Look at “Averages” and you will find your sentence average, as well as average sentence per paragraph and average character length for words.
If you don’t have Microsoft Word you can use analyzemywriting.com and paste your writing there and click “Analyze Text!”. Toward bottom, the last chart “Sentence Length” gives you the mean and median for your sentences (as well as a distribution of all of your sentence according to number of words).
Third, choose two different paragraphs and note the length of each sentence (in Word, use cursor to highlight sentence and in bottom left corner it tells you how long sentence is; in Google Docs, highlight sentence and then click Tools>Word Count).
Write down each length somewhere so you don’t forget (e.g., use comment function). Think about these questions:
- Do you note any patterns in length? (e.g., do you tend, in both paragraphs, to start with really long sentences followed by a short sentence? Or do you tend to have really short sentences of about equal length throughout?) Is there a rhetorical effect here? What? How does it make that effect?
- Is there a time where these patterns are violated? Is there a rhetorical effect there? What?
- To see the distribution of sentence lengths, you can use analyzemywriting.com (follow instructions from previous page). This can help you see bigger picture of whether you tend to always have roughly the same length of sentence or not.
In a comment below, name one thing that stood out to you about your writing based on this analysis.
After you comment below, click the button below to continue.
According to analyzemywriting.com, I have notice most my sentences varies from 11 words to 22 words.
One thing that stood out is that my average words per sentence falls at 40.7. And after analyzing two separate body paragraphs, each of them falls at 42 and 42.44 words per sentences. Therefore, my writing has long sentences in them since analyzemywriting.com also stated that all my sentences have more than 28 words in each of the paragraphs I analyzed.
Using the website provided, it has stated that Average Sentence Length is 29.3 and average word length is 4.41 for one paragraph and 17.62 and 4.34 for the other paragraph for to say that are very close averages. A thing that stood out to me is that I use more commas than periods.
According to the website, I noticed that my sentences are averaged at 14.62 and my word lengths are averaged at 4.25.
My average word length 4.92 average sentence length 14.87. Personally I found the complex word statistic extremely interesting. I love words and like when I’m able to incorporate fun words into my writing so I was surprised to see that in the 803 words I’ve written I only used 54 that have more than 3 syllables. I also found this an interesting metric of complexity as many words I would consider more uncommon (pendant, lucid, tetchy, trite, capricious, to name a few) have 3 or fewer syllables.
My average sentence length is about 35 words each sentence. This seems very long on average, especially considering that my shortest sentence was 16 words long and a lot of sentences are well above 40 words. This tells me either that I am very inefficient in my writing or that there truly was a lot of substantial substance to every idea in each sentence. Regardless, it is generally good to be an efficient writer and I should work on improving my efficiency.
One thing that stood out to me was that my average sentence length is about 23 words per sentence. I think that this is pretty appropriate, also there were 2 sentences in my essay that was over 50 words and that I think is a little too much.
According to the website provided my average sentence length is 24.07 and my average word length is 4.26
My average sentence length is 18.82 words and my median sentence length is 18.5. I noticed that I have 62 commas per 100 sentences.
From the website I learned that my average sentence length is 27.13 and my average word length is 4.4. I think my sentence length was about normal throughout the paragraph in question.
The average sentence length in my paper was 22.9 words, with an average of 139 commas per 100 sentences. This leads me to believe that I either probably use commas too often, or I like using lots of pauses in my writing. None of the sentences I had written really violated the pattern by a significant amount, so. I’d say it was relatively consistent.
My average sentence lenght was 19.03
According to the website, I found out that my average sentence length is 17 and my average word length is 5.02.