Your writing/posting style has a fingerprint. Interesting stuff inside. Honest.

retired_marleysghost · 10-25-2007, 11:13 PM

A recent blog post has said that each author has a particular writing style, and it can be quite easily traced using Amazon.

Apparently if you plot your Average Words per Sentence against your # of Complex Words, you get a fingerprint of your writing style.

Now I added a comment in the comments section showing how another of Amazon's features is to list the top 100 words in the book by frequency. An author I've read a lot of, Bill Bryson, has an almost identical list of 100 words from two different books (albeit on similar themes).

For the record, here are the stats of my World Cup blog, my only prolongued piece of writing (didn't have any essays handy):

Sentences per para3.0
Words per sentence18.9
Characters per word4.4

Flesch Reading Ease60.8% (where 121% is the best)
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level 9.4

What's your fingerprint?

retired_mountainsong · 10-25-2007, 11:17 PM

didnt aliashunter supposedly have some sort of feature that picked up on writing styles?

retired_rachelst · 10-25-2007, 11:26 PM

Yeah I immediately thought of Kris' program.

Anyway hadn't seen these Amazon stats before. Looks quite interesting. Going to try to analyze some of my papers.

How did you get your stats btw Joe?

retired_marleysghost · 10-25-2007, 11:26 PM

It's possible - although this is a "new" Amazon feature I bet they've been using it on their backend for analysis for some time.

Might be a way of deciding if an author might be for you though - at least a supplementary piece of info

retired_marleysghost · 10-25-2007, 11:29 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Satan, look at my pert arse!:
Yeah I immediately thought of Kris' program.

Anyway hadn't seen these Amazon stats before. Looks quite interesting. Going to try to analyze some of my papers.

How did you get your stats btw Joe?

There's a post in the comments section of the link I gave. Go to MS Word and turn on "Reading stats" or something, then do a spellcheck.

retired_rachelst · 10-25-2007, 11:30 PM

How do you get to a book's stats on Amazon?

retired_rachelst · 10-25-2007, 11:31 PM

Oh never mind...found it...it's under Inside this book

2boxers · 10-25-2007, 11:42 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by JoeWesthead:
<BLOCKQUOTE>Originally posted by Satan, look at my pert arse!:
Yeah I immediately thought of Kris' program.

Anyway hadn't seen these Amazon stats before. Looks quite interesting. Going to try to analyze some of my papers.

How did you get your stats btw Joe?

There's a post in the comments section of the link I gave. Go to MS Word and turn on "Reading stats" or something, then do a spellcheck. </BLOCKQUOTE>

Quote:

If you want to test your own writing (without getting a book published and sold on Amazon), you can do it within Microsoft Word (2000 or later, I think).

1. Under the Tools menu, choose Options.
2. On the Spelling and Grammar tab, check the boxes toward the bottom for "Check Grammar" and "Show readability statistics".
3. Click OK.
4. Under Tools, choose "Check Spelling and Grammar".
5. Click through all of the grammar mistakes that Word found in your document.
6. When it is done checking your grammar, Word will display readability statistics. It includes Words Per Sentence, but not syllables per word (although it does contain the Flesch Reading Ease score and Flesch-Kincaid score, which are partially based on both of these metrics).

2boxers · 10-25-2007, 11:50 PM

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level = the #complex words ?

retired_justin05 · 10-25-2007, 11:56 PM

Just put through some of my writing from my traveling and Flesch Reading Ease is 74% and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level is 8.8. Great.

Your writing/posting style has a fingerprint. Interesting stuff inside. Honest.

Grab a beer, sit back and relax.

Your writing/posting style has a fingerprint. Interesting stuff inside. Honest.