Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/543

Rh The above list includes romance, drama, allegory, criticism, biography, description, science and correspondence, but with the exception of 'Faust' and 'Reinecke Fuchs' the works are all in prose, so that the fact of variation is not disturbed even if we consider prose literature alone. There can be little doubt that a complete examination of Goethe's writings would furnish a chain of sentence-lengths varying by almost insensible gradations from five to thirty-five or forty words per sentence.

The conclusion from which there seems to be no escape is that the average sentence-length used by an author depends upon at least two factors, one of which is the author's sentence sense, the other the particular form of composition into which his thought is cast.

What is true of sentence-length holds equally true of predication averages and simple sentence percentages. Other things being equal, the shorter sentences will naturally contain the fewer predications, and a larger per cent, of simple sentences, the limits being single predications, on the one hand, and none but simple sentences, on the other. This general relation is fully made good by the facts. Macaulay, in his 'History of England,' uses 23.3 words per sentence and 2.3 finite verbs, which is almost exactly ten words to one verb. Nearly the same ratio obtains in More's 'Life of Richard III.' with an average of 3.65 verbs out of 36.5 words per sentence; Hooker's 'Ecclesiastical Polity,' with an average of 4.12 verbs and 40.9 words per sentence; Sidney's 'Defense of Poesie,' 3.98 verbs and 39.3 words per sentence; and Channing's 'Self-Culture' employs 2.57 verbs out of a total of 25.9 words per sentence. However, in very short sentences there is a tendency to diminish and in very long sentences to increase the ratio of the total number of words to the number of verbs per sentence. Thus Emerson in his 'Divinity School Address' uses 2.14 verbs and 18.0 words per sentence, while Hakluyt in the 'Voyages of the English Nation to America' uses but 4.44 verbs out of an average of 56.8 words per sentence.

A more striking though less obvious relation exists between predication averages and simple sentence percentages, which is all the more surprising, inasmuch as simple sentence percentages are the least constant of the sentence proportions thus far examined. For instance, Lyly's 'Euphues' furnishes for five consecutive hundreds 26, 14, 20, 15 and 8 simple sentences respectively. De Quincey's 'Opium-Eater' yields the numbers 10, 19, 15, 7 and 21 for consecutive hundreds, and Macaulay in his 'History of England' gives simple sentence percentages as widely divergent as 41 and 27, though each average is based upon 500 consecutive sentences. These are extreme cases, but even the average variation is high. An examination of fifty authors shows that the simple sentence percentages based upon an examination of 400 sentences, differs