8L Stats: Effect of dialogue occurence on story rating

[IWroteThis]

Seems like a nitpick, but I think I'd also consider paragraphs that go:
"Blah blah," he said.
"Blah blah blah," she replied.
"Blah blah blah!" he insisted.
"Blah blah blah?"

as dialogue-only. To me, that's a 100% dialogue sequence, but in a double-quote-only model it's 25%. Not sure to pick that up.

Yeah, and it only counts the last paragraph of multi-paragraph dialogue. Since the others only have an opening quote, they would be counted as narrative.

It looks simple at a glance, but it gets complex when you actually try to do it.

 

[IWroteThis]

I don't see how to do something like that. If there was a search page where I could specify a date that I want the stories for, I could do something like there. But I don't know of any such search page. Otherwise, you'd have to pull the data every day for two years. Pulling the data every day for a month gets old.

I did a search for the word "the" and chose the timeframe as 1 year (which is the longest) or newer. I got 65381 Stories, which would be an average of roughly 180 stories a day, which matches estimates I've seen elsewhere.

If you wanted two years, you'd have to use "Any Date" and order by date, then have your tool stop when it got to the cutoff date, but it should be doable.

 

[IWroteThis]

I agree. When I thought of doing the work to get the data, I thought percentage of dialogue would have a big impact on the rating.

I wonder if comparing the word counts inside and outside of quotes would provide different results than comparing paragraphs with dialogue?

 

[TheLobster]

Seems like a nitpick, but I think I'd also consider paragraphs that go:
"Blah blah," he said.
"Blah blah blah," she replied.
"Blah blah blah!" he insisted.
"Blah blah blah?"

as dialogue-only. To me, that's a 100% dialogue sequence, but in a double-quote-only model it's 25%. Not sure to pick that up.

Also:

“Hey,” he said, “this is dialogue, too!”

I have a tendency to write most of my dialogue this way, so OP’s methodology would classify even my most dialogue-heavy pieces to contain less than 10% dialogue.

 

[YmaOHyd]

Also:



I have a tendency to write most of my dialogue this way, so OP’s methodology would classify even my most dialogue-heavy pieces to contain less than 10% dialogue.

Only the revised methodology. The original methodology uses all opened and closed double-quotes. But yeah.