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Mathematics can only give you insight into things that can be quantified. When people try do things like (say) perform a statistical analysis of the tone of a n
by bccdee 2y ago
Mathematics can only give you insight into things that can be quantified. When people try do things like (say) perform a statistical analysis of the tone of a narrative, they have to either go through and numerically quantify the tone of each passage (time-consuming & of dubious value) or feed the whole thing through sentiment analysis software (practically useless). You'll learn much more from a close subjective reading of a few interesting passages.
- carlmr 2y agoBut we're talking about chapter lengths here, something that is trivially measurable.
- watwut 2y agoThe term "ideal chapter length" is not objective measurable term.
- passion__desire 2y agoMath has much more complex tools to deal with uncertainties. Error bars, distributions, grouping based on various criteria. learn more about them.
- watwut 2y agoNone of them helps to clarify what "ideal chapter length" means. This is not about uncertainty in terms of probabilities, this is about the term meaning different things to different people. This is exactly what is the problem - none of the stuff you suggest has remotely anything to do with what the actual question is.
- passion__desire 2y agoBut somehow using more words to explain other "words" will solve the problem.
- bccdee 2y agoYes. This process is also known as "thinking about it," and it often proves useful when data-driven approaches fail.
- passion__desire 2y agobut somehow it is unbaised and "pure".
- bccdee 2y agoWe're talking about the ideal chapter length. Yes, chapter length is easy to quantify. But what about chapter idealness? If we want to discover the ideal chapter length using statistics, we need a way to quantify how effective (or "ideal") a chapter is, and we need ways to control for all the variables that might skew the ideal chapter length (genre, style, etc). Of course, these ways don't exist. "What is an effective chapter" isn't even a question with a single answer—it depends on the author's goals (to inform, to entertain, to provoke a very specific feeling, etc). So anyone who tried to pull out a "chapter idealness in relation to word count" graph in an academic context would be laughed out of the room, and justifiably so.