Page 45 - Cyberculture and New Media

36 Formalisms of Digital Text
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number if we accept their 13.2 “words per sentence” measure, as it would
mean that over half of everything written is rendered in quotes.
Across 500 emails and 500 posts on random blogs, the pattern of
sentence length for each genre appears to be very similar (see figure 6).

Lexical Frequency Distribution

600
Number of Sentences 400 EMAILS
500

300
BLOGS
200
100
0
4 9 14 19 24 29 34 39 44 49
Number of Words

Figure 6. Frequency Distribution of sentences by word count, Emails and Blogs
If, even taking into consideration the wide disparities in style across
all possible authors, significant stylistic differences are found with the
distribution of sentence length in other genres, these could be attributed to the
structure of the genre, and its writing practices, which for the most part lack
interventions such as word count limit, editorship, and revision. All of these
would influence average length of sentence measures.
Overlaying sentence length (grouped in ranges of 5 words) all
communicative modes a single graphical frequency distribution, we identify
the first significant difference between text and conversational writing.