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/lit/ - Literature

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5141631 No.5141631 [Reply] [Original]

ITT: How much are you using "to be" verbs?


I've been so fucking bored lately, so I decided to do some completely arbitrary research on the frequency of to be verbs.

The Fault in Our Stars actually kinda surprised me, so I went back and re-did the whole process with 10,000 words. The results are listed.

I used the entirety of my 22,340 word work-in-progress to get my own number, 2.3%. I'm curious to see how some of your works turn out, though, so if you're interested, here's how to find out your percentage.

1. Take a 1,000 word selection of your work
2. Use ctrl-f to count every "to be" verb
3. Take the total amount and move the decimal one place to the left.

Have fun.

>> No.5141655

>>5141631
who has the time to do this shit

>> No.5141658

>>5141655
That entire table took me about 30 minutes to make.

lrn2research

>> No.5141665

>>5141658
you could have spent those 30 minutes doing literally (LITERALLY) anything else

>> No.5141668

>>5141631
out of a 500 word excerpt of mine I have 0%

>> No.5141673

>>5141665
You're on 4chan.
You have 30 minutes to waste.

>> No.5141677

>>5141668
I don't know if that's healthy, son.

>> No.5141687

I know this word gets thrown around so often that it's virtually meaningless, but...OP...

don't think I've ever seen anything more autistic than this.

>> No.5141688

>1.6%

>>5141668
h-he said 1,000 words though

>> No.5141699

>>5141687
Prepare your anus.

http://www.ulillillia.us/mainindex.shtml

>> No.5141705

>>5141687
My professor is a fucking nazi about "to be" verbs. I plan on showing him these statistics to prove that good literature can contain a good amount of them. Then, I plan on showing him the results of the data gathered on my own work.

It's called boredom, and humanity's greatest achievements all started with it.

>> No.5141709

>>5141631
2%

>> No.5141716
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5141716

>>5141677
>not being experimental
2014

>> No.5141717

>>5141705
Another contributing factor may be that i haven't slept in 5 days.

>> No.5141720

>>5141687
I dunno. You can't use the passive voice or a few simple forms of sentences without them. It might be closely enough connected to style to be worth looking at and thinking about.

>> No.5141729

>>5141716
>Comic LO as a pillow.
>Misc. Oppai Piggu as a blanket

There is def some sort of irony to this.

>> No.5141743

>>5141720
There is nothing wrong with either passive voice nor simple forms of sentences.

Your argument is invalid.

>b-b-but, my english 101 teacher said passive voice was bad!

Think for yourself.

>> No.5141751

>>5141720
I agree. There are most certainly trends to be found in this kind of research as well. The gradual rise in general laziness from nineteenth to twentieth century literature is just one of the hypotheses that could be proven by this research.

>> No.5141756

>>5141743
holy shit can you even read

>> No.5141772

>>5141743
I don't think that's what he was sayin brah

>> No.5141780

Enclosed is the ramification of exuding perceptions of the word "ballbag" in various extramperanous classifications of literature with title:


Huck Finn - 0%
Grapes of Wrath - 0%
Tropic of Cancer - 9%

>> No.5141787
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5141787

>>5141780
ohhhhh miller

>> No.5141792
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5141792

>>5141780

>> No.5141804
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5141804

Following is a list of well known authors who described fucking their flatulent girlfriend until each fart (big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and so on and so forth) was expelled from her anus:

Joyce, James

>> No.5141839

>>5141804
Clearly the trick to being a great writer is to fuck flatulent women. The anus air grants you increased mastery of any language of your choosing, like a JRPG power up.

>> No.5141840

english has more copulative verbs than you might think

appear, become, feel, grow, look, remain, seem. smell, sound, stay, taste, turn

>> No.5141868

>>5141743
Passive voice would not exist if it didn't have uses. But it's a form people abuse more often than not. Often it conceals the actor in a way that's confusing or awkward. In technical writing, people actually use passive voice to cover up impropriety and hide blame.

>> No.5141908

Out of my 15,000 word work-in progress I hit 3.6%, which is funny cause I thought I was going to hit a lot higher

>> No.5141916

>>5141868
>Often it conceals the actor in a way that's confusing or awkward.

If by "often" you mean "rarely".

>> No.5141936

Op do you happen to live in utah by chance?

>> No.5141945
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5141945

Cool research. If you learned some programming you'd be able to write a simple parser to eliminate the tedium of this kind of analysis.

>> No.5141955

>>5141945
>Spends 2 months learning enough programming to program a simple parser
>Could've done a shit-tonne of work in that time

I always wanted to learn how to code, but I would never know how to apply it, and then just gradually forget it.

>> No.5141985

>>5141916

No, the meaning intended in the sentence is "often."

>> No.5141995

>>5141985
Hmm. I wonder how retarded one has to be to get confused by passive voice.

>> No.5142059

>>5141995

Passive voice conceals (or tends to conceal) the main actor in a sentence, you smug little moron. This is fine if the actor is unknown or irrelevant, but used incorrectly it's clunky at best and purposely obtuse at worse.

>> No.5142066

>>5142059
It sounds like you get confused often. Sorry to draw attention to your disabilities.

>> No.5142072
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5142072

Reading Shakepeare is very difficult for me. How do I get better?

>> No.5142120

>>5142066

Passive voice often creates meandering, garden-path sentences:

>As a means of providing scientists with appropriate tertiary data, the conference is intended to serve as a communication medium for everyone involved in the manipulation and dissemination of research findings.

>The decision by the managers was that the activity of the committee for road improvement would be ceased for the duration of the term.

If you tell me that you can parse these sentences in one pass, you're a liar.

>> No.5142121

>>5141631
Can you give a list of what we should look for. Any variation of 'am', 'was', 'is', 'are' etc?

>> No.5142128

>>5142072
You are of the intelligence of someone who posts pro-Romney images unironically. So I doubt there's anything you can do sadly.

>> No.5142138

>>5142128
Mitt Romney did nothing wrong.

>> No.5142142

>>5142128
What if it's an ironically anti-Romney image?

>> No.5142149

>>5141840
I thought of that as well. Although if any other word were to be included it would be "have".

>> No.5142154

>>5141936
Nope.

>> No.5142179

>>5142121
anything "to be".

am, are, is, was, were, be, been, being

>> No.5142193

>>5142120
Teach me not to write in the passive voice.

I find it so hard not to.

>> No.5142216

>>5142193
It's called college, pal.

>> No.5142226

>>5142128
th-the image is a joke ;_;

>> No.5142241

>>5142216
I went to college and they fucking taut me the passive voice there. Now I can't go back.

>> No.5142245

>>5142193
Ask yourself "who's kicking who?" If you can identify the sentence's main actor/subject, and this actor comes first, you're writing in an active voice.

Red flags are the presence of the word "by" and the presence of "to be" verb forms.

We decided to go to the store -> Active.
A decision was made to go to the store. -> Passive.

A ball hit Claude. -> Active.
Claude was hit by the ball. -> Passive.

>> No.5142257

>>5142245
Thanks man.

>> No.5142262

>>5142241
Sounds like they taut you jack shit

>> No.5142277

>>5142262
Well, if you're deducing something, it's hard to be overly assertive. There is such a call to use the active voice all the time, but I find the passive to be useful in speculative cases, or when hypothesising about a motive (in the case of a historical event, for instance).

When I can't know something for certain, why would I use the active voice? One cunt of a lecturer insisted on it, regardless.

>> No.5142314

out of my 104,979 word science fiction WIP, fully 9.23% of my words are one of the following:

am, are, is, was, were, be, been, being.

Now I think I have one more clue as to how I know my book blows.

oh well, too deep in the shit now to back out.

>> No.5142319

>>5142277
Not completely sure on the ins and outs of the passive and active voices, so I'm just gonna fire some questions at you.

Can a narrative switch between the passive and active voices?
What would be the right and the wrong situation to write in the passive/active voice?
Does it have anything to do with perspective?

I'm a terrible student.

>> No.5142324

>>5142314
try your math again man, that would mean 1 out of 10 words is a "to be" verb. that sounds off.

>> No.5142328

>frequencies per 1,000 words of each title.

None of those titles have a thousand words. Wow. Epic fail.

>> No.5142340
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5142340

>>5142328
better for babby?

>> No.5142358

>>5142319
I feel frustrated with the whole thing, to be honest. It;s very easy to apply the passive and active voices in simple speech, but when it comes to academic writing, it's very hard to stay within the active voice only, especually when you are hypothesising.

Maybe I am just afraid to seem too self-assured and oblivious to counter-opinions. I really dislike reading academic texts which seem overly sure of their methodology, when they are not something like poli-sci or economics, which it's possible to be empirical within.

For instance, I took an art analysis class, and the lecturer wants you to say things like

"X challenges notions of Y and subverts Z... etc"

While I would be more inclined to write

"X appears to challenge notions of Y and, potentially, subvert X."

I prefer this style because I cannot know for certain that what I'm writing is true. I think it's very arrogant to writ in an acitve style, as if you have insider knowledge on what an artist intended.
I fucking hate art analysis. Such a circle-jerk.

>> No.5142369

>>5142358
So it's kinda like 3rd person omniscient vs 3rd person limited?

>> No.5142386

>>5142369
Not really. That's got to do with the scope of a story, not syntax.

>> No.5142404

>>5142386
I understand the gist. Thanks mang.

>> No.5142414

>>5142404
Look up some articles about it. I didn't explain it too well. I wouldn't want to misdirect you into writing badly in college.

There are lots of articles. Just type it into google.

>> No.5142423

>>5142324
I don't know what to tell you man. I just double-checked my math with another person, and I'm getting ~9 percent.

Raw numbers are as follows:

9687 "to be" words counted using cntrl-f in Word 2010

104,979 words counted in total for the whole WIP by Word 2010.

It's just disgustingly high.

>> No.5142441

>>5142423
you have to put a space in front of the word and after the word or else when you type "is" it will count every time those letters show up in a different word like "his" or "this"

>> No.5142451

>>5142441
oh shit haha let me try it again

>> No.5142458

>>5142358
>I prefer this style because I cannot know for certain that what I'm writing is true.
writing is the pursuit of truth. you're writing for your reader; allow them to find out what they agree with and what they don't.

analysis does this heavily because you're waxing subjective. if something appears to do something, it does that thing FOR YOU, which makes it true for at least one person and, therefore, true.

>> No.5142476

>>5142458
Good point.

I may try and get over my intellectual inferiority complex.

Thanks.

>> No.5142481
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5142481

>>5142451
OK so the new numbers are much "better" lol:

2,710 "to be" words

104,979 words counted in total for the whole WIP.

0.0258...

~2.6%

>> No.5142494

>>5142481
thems is some good numbers fella

>> No.5142568

>>5142494
it's still shit, but at least it's not shit this way! lol.

BTW, for people interested in this (I am, which is why I was attracted to this thread) - this kind of textual analysis is broadly known as Corpus Linguistics. I got into it a little when I was in College between my Cog Sci and English major work; turns out statistics and math has a place even in the liberal arts!

I just went to http://www.lextutor.ca/concordancers/

and used the standard Brown Condordance (a random collection of 1 million words from texts in 1960) to check what the standard one might measure themselves against would be.

Using the same measure I used on my own WIP, I found that the Brown Concordance has a "to be" rate of ~3.74% (37,418 / 1,000,000).

So most writers, it seems, fall well below the average, even when writing in the past tense (as I am).

>> No.5142591

>>5142568
Op here. That's pretty fucking awesome, man. I just started doing random shit because I was bored and wanted to be a dick to my professor.

Who woulda thunk it

>> No.5142615

>>5142072
keep reading shakespeare

>> No.5142641

>>5142591
that isn't even half of it. the real big eggheads that get into this use corpus linguistics to measure things like the genetic drift rate for languages.

You read that right the first time. It is currently state of the art to treat natural languages as genomes.