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regshoeD. K. Broster and E. W. Hornung have a lot in common: both authors of romantic adventure stories writing around the early twentieth century, both got their start publishing short stories and poetry in magazines before writing novels and story collections, both provide lots of fuel for slash fanfiction—and, of course, they're both my faves. So, having done some meta looking at the details of language in the prose of both authors, I thought I'd continue the series with a comparison between them.
This post uses the texts of the Raffles books (The Amateur Cracksman, The Black Mask, A Thief in the Night and Mr Justice Raffles) by E. W. Hornung and The Flight of the Heron by D. K. Broster.
Starting with some basic stats:
[Edited with what I hope is a slightly more accurate way of estimating average sentence length!]
The Raffles books are pretty short—Flight of the Heron, itself not a hugely long novel, is more than half the length of all four combined—so it's a reasonably fair comparison. Broster's sentences are quite a bit longer on average—long, intricate descriptive sentences being a characteristic feature of her writing, this is what I was expecting!
If I had some more sophisticated techniques, I think it would be interesting to look at sentence types and variation in sentence lengths as well—a project for the future, perhaps.
Next I looked at punctuation. Numbers in this table show the frequency of each punctuation mark per 1,000 words:
Broster uses substantially more commas than Hornung; but Hornung's punctuation is more varied, with most of the more unusual punctuation marks appearing more often. On em dashes and semicolons, which tend to play fairly similar roles in breaking up longer sentences, they differ sharply: Hornung uses about twice as many semicolons as Broster, while Broster uses about twice as many em dashes as Hornung, with the combined frequency of both being fairly similar (13.8 vs 14.9—as with the rest of the non-comma punctuation marks, Hornung's frequency is slightly higher). And Broster is, of course, very much more fond of dramatic... ellipses...
I then looked at paragraphs and dialogue. Flight of the Heron has an average of 59.7 words per paragraph, while the Raffles stories have an average of 42.3 words. Longer paragraphs from Broster was more or less what I expected here; but, of course, the length of paragraphs depends a lot on how much dialogue there is, since narrative paragraphs tend to be longer than paragraphs of dialogue.
I counted dialogue lines via the number of double inverted commas ". This isn't a perfect measure, for several reasons2, but it provides a rough estimate. Flight of the Heron has approximately 2,320 lines of dialogue, or 18.2 per 1,000 words; the Raffles stories have approximately 5,512 lines of dialogue, or 23.2 per 1,000 words. Again, this accords with my intuitions: the Raffles stories are more dialogue-heavy, and this perhaps goes some way towards explaining why the paragraphs are shorter.
Again, if I had more sophisticated techniques for doing so, I'd like to look at the length of dialogue lines and the proportion of the text made up of dialogue vs narration.
Next I examined section length. Flight of the Heron is a novel divided into chapters3, with a prologue and epilogue; the first three Raffles books are collections of short stories, while Mr Justice Raffles is a novel divided into chapters.
The average length of a chapter of Flight of the Heron, counting both the prologue and epilogue as chapters, is 4,386 words. The shortest is the epilogue at 1,823 words, which is a bit of an outlier—the average length excluding the epilogue is 4,477 words, with the next shortest chapter being chapter 4.3 at 3,183 words and the longest being chapter 4.6 at 5,934 words. The standard deviation of chapter lengths is 838 words, or 690 excluding the epilogue.
The average length of a Raffles short story is 6,619 words. The shortest is 'The Last Word' at 2,212 words; again, this is an outlier. The average length excluding 'The Last Word' is 6,794 words; the next shortest story is 'The Wrong House' at 4,484 words, and the longest is 'An Old Flame' at 8,639. The standard deviation is 1,345 words, or 1,021 excluding 'The Last Word'. The average length of a chapter of Mr Justice Raffles is 3,469 words; the shortest is chapter XIX at 1,726 words and the longest is chapter XV at 5,500 words, with no huge outliers. The standard deviation is 968 words.
Raffles short stories are longer than chapters of Flight of the Heron, then, which is perhaps not surprising given that they're complete short stories rather than sections of a single work; chapters of Mr Justice Raffles are shorter than those of FotH. Raffles sections are consistently more variable in length than FotH chapters. Interestingly, both Flight of the Heron and the Raffles short stories have a single short outlier section at the end!
Next, that absorbing linguistic topic, contractions. I estimated the number of contractions by counting the number of apostrophes, subtracting occurrences of 's to remove possessives, then adding back in some common contractions including 's. Again, this isn't perfect4, but it'll do as an estimate. For this to work I had to remove three Raffles stories—'Le Premier Pas', 'The Fate of Faustina' and 'The Last Word'—which contain substantial amounts of dialogue within dialogue, as this is marked by single inverted commas which are not distinguishable from apostrophes when searching the text.
The final estimated contraction rate is 7.7 contractions per 1,000 words for Flight of the Heron and 18.3 for Raffles. Here are the figures for some common contractions—these are frequencies per 10,000 words, and have those three Raffles stories added back in:
These results are very clear: Hornung uses contractions more than Broster! This was not unexpected. Hornung's writing definitely tends to be less formal than Broster's, albeit it's a very elegant and grammatically precise informality. Interestingly, contractions with 'I' are not disproportionately frequent in the Raffles stories, although they are written in the first person and FotH in the third. Perhaps this suggests that both authors are mostly using contractions in dialogue rather than narration, so the pronouns used in narration don't make much difference? The only contraction which Broster uses more than Hornung is 'tis—appropriate for her eighteenth-century setting, with 'tis evidently having become much less common by the late nineteenth century of the Raffles stories.
One last contractions measure: the ratio between don't, a common contraction, and its uncontracted equivalent do not. As discussed before, this ratio is 0.37 for Flight of the Heron5, and the linked post also gives ratios for some other older and modern books. For Raffles it's 27.6—more than any other book on my list except the much more recent Good Omens, and an even more stark contrast with Flight of the Heron.
Finally, for a bit of fun, I decided to test my own pastiche skills by calculating some of the same measures for my fanfiction. 'Where the White Lilies Grow' is my most recent Raffles fic; 'No Unfitting Anchorage' and 'No Man Can Shun It' are my two longest Flight of the Heron fics from last year.
My average word length and sentence length are very consistent, and pretty similar to both Broster and Hornung. My comma density in both cases is intermediate, although it is higher, and hence closer to FotH, in the FotH fics. I've managed to replicate Broster's don't:do not ratio almost perfectly in my FotH fic; but while this ratio is higher in the Raffles fic, it's still much lower than Hornung's. Similarly, my ellipsis density is intermediate but definitely moving in the right direction in each case. Where I really fall down is with em dashes and semicolons. Like Broster, I strongly prefer em dashes to semicolons, and I haven't managed to adjust this to Raffles—in fact I show a stronger bias towards em dashes in the Raffles fic. Overall I'm fairly pleased with this—it does show some real evidence of style adjustment in each case, and I shall remember to use fewer em dashes and more semicolons in Raffles fic from now on!
One final thing that didn't fit anywhere else. Like Broster, Hornung shows a strong preference for the word 'round' rather than 'around', though it's not quite as strong in his case: the Raffles books have 125 rounds and 5 arounds, while FotH has 140 rounds and just one around.
1'Characters' includes punctuation, but not spaces.
2Double inverted commas are sometimes used for other things, such as paraphrased quotes and letters; dialogue within dialogue is marked by single inverted commas, which can't easily be distinguished from apostrophes when searching the text; and dialogue that spans multiple paragraphs won't have exactly two sets of inverted commas per dialogue line.
3The chapters are themselves arranged into Books; but these don't have a neat parallel in the Raffles stories, so I didn't use them in my comparison.
4It misses contractions made from an unusual word with 'is'—'The Ides of March' contains the example 'intimate's not the word'—and also misses cases where the possessive and the contraction with 'is' are actually the same, e.g. 'one's'.
5Corrected from 0.35 when first posted!
This post uses the texts of the Raffles books (The Amateur Cracksman, The Black Mask, A Thief in the Night and Mr Justice Raffles) by E. W. Hornung and The Flight of the Heron by D. K. Broster.
Starting with some basic stats:
| Flight of the Heron | Raffles stories | |
| Total word count | 127,191 | 237,984 |
| Average characters per word1 | 4.5 | 4.3 |
| Average words per sentence | 18.9 | 15.7 |
[Edited with what I hope is a slightly more accurate way of estimating average sentence length!]
The Raffles books are pretty short—Flight of the Heron, itself not a hugely long novel, is more than half the length of all four combined—so it's a reasonably fair comparison. Broster's sentences are quite a bit longer on average—long, intricate descriptive sentences being a characteristic feature of her writing, this is what I was expecting!
If I had some more sophisticated techniques, I think it would be interesting to look at sentence types and variation in sentence lengths as well—a project for the future, perhaps.
Next I looked at punctuation. Numbers in this table show the frequency of each punctuation mark per 1,000 words:
| Punctuation mark | Flight of the Heron | Raffles stories |
| Comma , | 78.9 | 60.9 |
| Semicolon ; | 5.5 | 10.9 |
| Colon : | 0.5 | 0.7 |
| Exclamation mark ! | 6.5 | 7.7 |
| Question mark ? | 6.0 | 7.3 |
| Em dash — | 8.3 | 4.0 |
| Ellipsis ... | 3.5 | 0.2 |
Broster uses substantially more commas than Hornung; but Hornung's punctuation is more varied, with most of the more unusual punctuation marks appearing more often. On em dashes and semicolons, which tend to play fairly similar roles in breaking up longer sentences, they differ sharply: Hornung uses about twice as many semicolons as Broster, while Broster uses about twice as many em dashes as Hornung, with the combined frequency of both being fairly similar (13.8 vs 14.9—as with the rest of the non-comma punctuation marks, Hornung's frequency is slightly higher). And Broster is, of course, very much more fond of dramatic... ellipses...
I then looked at paragraphs and dialogue. Flight of the Heron has an average of 59.7 words per paragraph, while the Raffles stories have an average of 42.3 words. Longer paragraphs from Broster was more or less what I expected here; but, of course, the length of paragraphs depends a lot on how much dialogue there is, since narrative paragraphs tend to be longer than paragraphs of dialogue.
I counted dialogue lines via the number of double inverted commas ". This isn't a perfect measure, for several reasons2, but it provides a rough estimate. Flight of the Heron has approximately 2,320 lines of dialogue, or 18.2 per 1,000 words; the Raffles stories have approximately 5,512 lines of dialogue, or 23.2 per 1,000 words. Again, this accords with my intuitions: the Raffles stories are more dialogue-heavy, and this perhaps goes some way towards explaining why the paragraphs are shorter.
Again, if I had more sophisticated techniques for doing so, I'd like to look at the length of dialogue lines and the proportion of the text made up of dialogue vs narration.
Next I examined section length. Flight of the Heron is a novel divided into chapters3, with a prologue and epilogue; the first three Raffles books are collections of short stories, while Mr Justice Raffles is a novel divided into chapters.
The average length of a chapter of Flight of the Heron, counting both the prologue and epilogue as chapters, is 4,386 words. The shortest is the epilogue at 1,823 words, which is a bit of an outlier—the average length excluding the epilogue is 4,477 words, with the next shortest chapter being chapter 4.3 at 3,183 words and the longest being chapter 4.6 at 5,934 words. The standard deviation of chapter lengths is 838 words, or 690 excluding the epilogue.
The average length of a Raffles short story is 6,619 words. The shortest is 'The Last Word' at 2,212 words; again, this is an outlier. The average length excluding 'The Last Word' is 6,794 words; the next shortest story is 'The Wrong House' at 4,484 words, and the longest is 'An Old Flame' at 8,639. The standard deviation is 1,345 words, or 1,021 excluding 'The Last Word'. The average length of a chapter of Mr Justice Raffles is 3,469 words; the shortest is chapter XIX at 1,726 words and the longest is chapter XV at 5,500 words, with no huge outliers. The standard deviation is 968 words.
Raffles short stories are longer than chapters of Flight of the Heron, then, which is perhaps not surprising given that they're complete short stories rather than sections of a single work; chapters of Mr Justice Raffles are shorter than those of FotH. Raffles sections are consistently more variable in length than FotH chapters. Interestingly, both Flight of the Heron and the Raffles short stories have a single short outlier section at the end!
Next, that absorbing linguistic topic, contractions. I estimated the number of contractions by counting the number of apostrophes, subtracting occurrences of 's to remove possessives, then adding back in some common contractions including 's. Again, this isn't perfect4, but it'll do as an estimate. For this to work I had to remove three Raffles stories—'Le Premier Pas', 'The Fate of Faustina' and 'The Last Word'—which contain substantial amounts of dialogue within dialogue, as this is marked by single inverted commas which are not distinguishable from apostrophes when searching the text.
The final estimated contraction rate is 7.7 contractions per 1,000 words for Flight of the Heron and 18.3 for Raffles. Here are the figures for some common contractions—these are frequencies per 10,000 words, and have those three Raffles stories added back in:
| Contraction | Flight of the Heron | Raffles stories |
| that's | 2.0 | 9.8 |
| it's | 1.7 | 17.3 |
| don't | 2.8 | 16.3 |
| I'll | 3.9 | 5.8 |
| I'm | 2.5 | 10.1 |
| you'll | 1.9 | 3.3 |
| 'tis | 4.2 | 0.1 |
| couldn't | No uses | 3.6 |
These results are very clear: Hornung uses contractions more than Broster! This was not unexpected. Hornung's writing definitely tends to be less formal than Broster's, albeit it's a very elegant and grammatically precise informality. Interestingly, contractions with 'I' are not disproportionately frequent in the Raffles stories, although they are written in the first person and FotH in the third. Perhaps this suggests that both authors are mostly using contractions in dialogue rather than narration, so the pronouns used in narration don't make much difference? The only contraction which Broster uses more than Hornung is 'tis—appropriate for her eighteenth-century setting, with 'tis evidently having become much less common by the late nineteenth century of the Raffles stories.
One last contractions measure: the ratio between don't, a common contraction, and its uncontracted equivalent do not. As discussed before, this ratio is 0.37 for Flight of the Heron5, and the linked post also gives ratios for some other older and modern books. For Raffles it's 27.6—more than any other book on my list except the much more recent Good Omens, and an even more stark contrast with Flight of the Heron.
Finally, for a bit of fun, I decided to test my own pastiche skills by calculating some of the same measures for my fanfiction. 'Where the White Lilies Grow' is my most recent Raffles fic; 'No Unfitting Anchorage' and 'No Man Can Shun It' are my two longest Flight of the Heron fics from last year.
| 'No Unfitting Anchorage' and 'No Man Can Shun It' (combined) | 'Where the White Lilies Grow' | |
| Average characters per word | 4.5 | 4.5 |
| Average words per sentence | 21.4 | 21.6 |
| Comma density | 72.7 | 68.6 |
| Em dash density | 12.8 | 10.1 |
| Semicolon density | 7.2 | 4.4 |
| Ellipsis density | 2.5 | 0.9 |
| Don't:do not ratio | 0.38 | 3.0 |
My average word length and sentence length are very consistent, and pretty similar to both Broster and Hornung. My comma density in both cases is intermediate, although it is higher, and hence closer to FotH, in the FotH fics. I've managed to replicate Broster's don't:do not ratio almost perfectly in my FotH fic; but while this ratio is higher in the Raffles fic, it's still much lower than Hornung's. Similarly, my ellipsis density is intermediate but definitely moving in the right direction in each case. Where I really fall down is with em dashes and semicolons. Like Broster, I strongly prefer em dashes to semicolons, and I haven't managed to adjust this to Raffles—in fact I show a stronger bias towards em dashes in the Raffles fic. Overall I'm fairly pleased with this—it does show some real evidence of style adjustment in each case, and I shall remember to use fewer em dashes and more semicolons in Raffles fic from now on!
One final thing that didn't fit anywhere else. Like Broster, Hornung shows a strong preference for the word 'round' rather than 'around', though it's not quite as strong in his case: the Raffles books have 125 rounds and 5 arounds, while FotH has 140 rounds and just one around.
1'Characters' includes punctuation, but not spaces.
2Double inverted commas are sometimes used for other things, such as paraphrased quotes and letters; dialogue within dialogue is marked by single inverted commas, which can't easily be distinguished from apostrophes when searching the text; and dialogue that spans multiple paragraphs won't have exactly two sets of inverted commas per dialogue line.
3The chapters are themselves arranged into Books; but these don't have a neat parallel in the Raffles stories, so I didn't use them in my comparison.
4It misses contractions made from an unusual word with 'is'—'The Ides of March' contains the example 'intimate's not the word'—and also misses cases where the possessive and the contraction with 'is' are actually the same, e.g. 'one's'.
5Corrected from 0.35 when first posted!
