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.

Edit: Adding story counts

35-45% dialog is the peak of the distribution, with things falling off on either side.

 

[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.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

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.

I agree.

I have twelve stories here longer than seven pages (the longest is 81 pages). Eleven are in Novels/Novella and one is in Romance. Both are categories where readers seem to embrace longer, single submission stories.

I would estimate that these average between 60 to 70 percent dialogue.

The average rating is 4.77, compared to my overall story rating of 4.62.

 

[iwatchus]

Trying to suss out independence of variables is going to be hard. Maybe impossible with the scarce data we have in many buckets.

Does Romance give higher scores, which it does, because that is the nature of the audience (we love our HEA, including good scores) or because it has longer stories on average? How much does the higher scores in Romance (and N&N), where stories are longer, drive the higher ratings for longer stories?

Are romance writers hustlers better writers, so get better scores? Someone had already pointed out that better writers may be more likely to write longer stories

This is beyond my statistical analysis wizardry to figure out. I might ask my son. Or even better, @TheRedLantern?

 

[SimonDoom]

By the way, 8Letters, this effort is appreciated. I think it's helpful to see the real data behind all the conjecture and narrative about what's popular here.

 

[lovecraft68]

What's the point of these things?

Are people going to change how they write over things like this?

Going to look at how long their WIP is and try to pad it to be longer, see how much dialogue and try to add or cut it over a graph?

I know for some its just 'interesting' to see it but for others, things like this are detrimental to actual writing.

But as time goes on I've begun to question more and more how serious a lot of people are about their actual writing as opposed to stats and how popular they are in the forum.

 

[Bazzle]

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.

I "hate" stories where its all dialogue, cant get into them! Its strange isnt it...art.

 

[AwkwardMD]

What's the point of these things?

Are people going to change how they write over things like this?

Going to look at how long their WIP is and try to pad it to be longer, see how much dialogue and try to add or cut it over a graph?

I know for some its just 'interesting' to see it but for others, things like this are detrimental to actual writing.

But as time goes on I've begun to question more and more how serious a lot of people are about their actual writing as opposed to stats and how popular they are in the forum.

Or attempting to correct for a significant black mark.

 

[iwatchus]

What's the point of these things?

Are people going to change how they write over things like this?

Going to look at how long their WIP is and try to pad it to be longer, see how much dialogue and try to add or cut it over a graph?

I know for some its just 'interesting' to see it but for others, things like this are detrimental to actual writing.

But as time goes on I've begun to question more and more how serious a lot of people are about their actual writing as opposed to stats and how popular they are in the forum.

I think for a lot of us who do not have much faith in our own writing, the stats are a form of external validation. But I'm not one to take a number at face value, so I want more analysis to understand it.

In one sense, I'm not sure how much I care about the dialogue percentage question. I'm not going to change the way I feel a story wants to be written to shift the rating by .1 But I am naturally a very quantitative thinker in many ways, so I enjoy the data and the discussion.

I do have two stories that shocked me with their scores on the low side. Others in the same range didn't surprise me at all. I would like to understand why they were poorly received. If i can say, oh it's because it had too little dialogue, I would be comforted. (It's not why.)

 

[ColtonWrites]

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.

I see this as being an issue with trying to do this analysis on anything I've written, because I was taught that new dialogue means a new paragraph. So
"Yes?"
"Yes, what?" His voice was low and commanding.
"Yes, sir."
"That's better."

Is now 4 paragraph, with 100% dialogue per paragraph. But any other equally long string of words would probably be 1 paragraph.

 

[Statius]

When I'm actually writing a story, I could care less about any of it. Most of my stories I'm experimenting with something anyway, so whatever that is, is the focus. It's all practice for the next one. However it is hard once I release a story to watch it tank no matter how hard I try not to care. It takes a long time for me to get over it even if I do tell myself it doesn't matter; I just can't quite convince myself of it yet.

I also agree that things like this are splitting hairs and border on pointless, especially for new writers. It's noise and it's confusing.