Authors Anonymous Statistics In Your World 
Student Notes
Teachers Notes
Detective Work
 

Summary
We can compare two passages to see how the literary styles used by the authors differ, by looking for statistical clues.

Statistical clues can be found by comparing:

Words, including:

  1 Length of words used
  2 Mode word length
  3 Range of word length
* 4 Mean word length
  5 Proportion of long words used
  6 Proportion of short words used

Sentences, including

1 Lengths of sentences, i.e. how many words they contain
2 Mode sentence length (usually a modal class)
3 Range of sentence length
4 Mean sentence length
5 Proportion of long sentences
6 Proportion of short sentences

We would expect books written by the same author to have roughly similar answers to each of the clues listed. If there are many marked differences, then it is likely that the books are by different authors.

 

Detective Work
You are going to compare two passages with passage A to decide which is the odd one out.

The same author wrote two of the passages, and a different author wrote the third.

Your teacher will give you details of the passages.

a For these passages, find the answers to the clues above.
Which two passages are by the same author? State your reasons.

 

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