regshoe

Aha, you've solved a problem for me...

Broster does also use ellipses in FotH—449 of them, in fact, or 3.5 per 1,000 words. BUT while I was going through the document checking this, I realised that the search for full stops that I used to calculate sentence length was picking up dots in ellipses too, and since Hornung uses them far less (only 0.2 per 1,000 words), this was causing a serious underestimation of Broster's relative average sentence length—it should actually be more like [edit, been refining my technique] 19 words/sentence to Hornung's 16, much more what I expected! So thank you for that :D I shall go and correct the numbers in the post presently.

Anyway—yeah, the idea of authors changing their writing style over time is interesting in general, too. Hornung's style definitely seems to evolve and change between different books, though I suspect the features that made me think that might not be ones that would show up easily in this sort of analysis.

And those figures are very interesting! Huh, sentences and paragraphs both getting shorter over time (but so that the average sentences per paragraph remains fairly similar, interestingly) while word length stays pretty constant. I'm happy to see that Broster at 19 words/sentence is indeed loquacious for the 20th century :D And Hornung's sentences are fairly short for the 19th, which fits with my perception of him as much less wordy and dense than a lot of earlier Victorian authors.