8L Stats: Effect of dialogue occurence on story rating

[8letters]

I went through 32,229 stories from 8/30/2023 to 3/26/24 and looked at how many paragraphs in the story contained dialogue. I defined "contained dialogue" as having a double quote ("). Yes, I know some writers use single quotes instead of double quotes to enclose dialogue, but hopefully that is a very small percentage of the stories.

As usual, page length is the biggest driver of rating. Here's the average rating by page length and percentage of paragraphs that contain dialog:

30% to 70% seems to be the sweet spot, with a drop off when the story is out of that range. The longer the story, the less significant the effect.

 

[YmaOHyd]

Is there a minimum sample?

 

[NotWise]

Interesting. The variations at high % are large enough to make me think the samples sizes there were pretty small and the result not real meaningful.

 

[TheLobster]

Interesting. The variations at high % are large enough to make me think the samples sizes there were pretty small and the result not real meaningful.

The 4.85 at 7+ pages of 85% is especially suspect. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a single story that matched those parameters.

 

[TheRedLantern]

Interesting. The variations at high % are large enough to make me think the samples sizes there were pretty small and the result not real meaningful.

@8letters do you still have the lower level data? Perhaps binning them less granularly than 5% might make trends (or absence of trends) more clear.

 

[YmaOHyd]

The 4.85 at 7+ pages of 85% is especially suspect. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a single story that matched those parameters.

I was looking at 4 pages: 85%, 4.55; 90%, 4.79; 95%, 4.21; 100%; 4.94.

 

[Writer61]

As usual, page length is the biggest driver of rating.

Is it? I don't see that in these figures. Not doubting your analysis, but the average rating between 1 and 7+ pages looks pretty flat. Padding/cutting a story to hit some perceived ideal feels like a fool's errand.

 

[YmaOHyd]

Is it? I don't see that in these figures. Not doubting your analysis, but the average rating between 1 and 7+ pages looks pretty flat. Padding/cutting a story to hit some perceived ideal feels like a fool's errand.

I don't think padding or cutting to hit an ideal ratings length is a good idea. But if you look across the rows, I think there's a pretty clear trend that longer stories have higher ratings for any individual dialogue range. The average rating of these buckets is like 4.14 for 1-pagers and 4.6 for 7-pagers, and the only category that's lower than the one before it is 6-pagers (4.558 compared to 4.56 for 5-pagers). 3-6 are pretty flat, all in the 4.5s, but they do continue to climb.

Mostly I think that's a bit of survivorship bias plus a bit of better writers being capable of writing longer pieces before running out of steam. Stories protect themselves with length; you rate at the end and people who don't hate it but don't love it tend to leave without giving the threes and fours.

Tough to know how much weight to give any of that without knowing how many stories are in the buckets. I'd be willing to bet that the 4-page, 100% bucket is one story, and that there are really very few pieces actually above maybe 75% dialogue.

 

[NotWise]

Is it? I don't see that in these figures. Not doubting your analysis, but the average rating between 1 and 7+ pages looks pretty flat. Padding/cutting a story to hit some perceived ideal feels like a fool's errand.

That was a subject from a different 8L analysis done several years ago.

It would be a large project, but interesting nonetheless, to put together statistics on several significant variables and do an anova.

 

[Statius]

I did get told once, in a two page story, that no dialogue equals boring story. Two lines of dialogue at the very end. Story has 14k plus, and 4.52 rating. It was just an unpolished narrative experiment. Published in Jan. So not so great on reads.

 

[iwatchus]

I did get told once, in a two page story, that no dialogue equals boring story. Two lines of dialogue at the very end. Story has 14k plus, and 4.52 rating. It was just an unpolished narrative experiment. Published in Jan. So not so great on reads.

What category? 14K would be great is some categories, terrible in others.

If you talk about statistics about a story, category is really important. Probably more so than length or dialogue.

 

[IWroteThis]

I'm not sure exactly how to go about it, but it might be interesting to differentiate between stories where all dialogue is its own paragraph versus stories where dialogue is interspersed within the narrative paragraphs. The difference in the total number of paragraphs in otherwise identical stories will throw off grouping by percentage.

 

[Statius]

What category? 14K would be great is some categories, terrible in others.

If you talk about statistics about a story, category is really important. Probably more so than length or dialogue.

https://literotica.com/s/a-woman-obsessed

Erotic couplings. 14.7k reads.
PUBLISHED
Hot
4.52 / 86
22
14.7k
3

 

[NaughteeDragon]

@8letters I am curious to know if you had a tool to do that or if you were doing it by Mark 1 Eyeball?
If you have a tool for that, I'd love to know how you did it. I'd be curious to run the numbers on my own work.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

I went through 32,229 stories from 8/30/2023 to 3/26/24 and looked at how many ....

Hey 8, can your data scraping give us a number of 'active' authors?

There is some speculation in this thread: https://forum.literotica.com/threads/lit-is-on-auto-pilot.1644641/

Consider 'active' to mean at least one story published in the last two years. Cut it to a year if you wish.

 

[SimonDoom]

The impact of dialogue is less significant than i would have guessed. For me, as a reader, it is important. I often find long passages without dialogue tedious.