this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2025
75 points (96.3% liked)
Mildly Interesting
20208 readers
643 users here now
This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.
This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?
Just post some stuff and don't spam.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I’d like to see them take variance (i.e., range of different sentence lengths) into account—my impression is that more-modern writing has a more dynamic mix of long and short sentences, which could skew the stats in an unintuitive way.
Consider two paragraphs that both have a total of 300 words:
Paragraph A has three 100-word sentences.
Paragraph B has two 140-word sentences and four 5-word sentences.
Paragraph B has half the average sentence length of paragraph A, but over 90% of the text of B is comprised of sentences that are significantly longer than any of the sentences of A.