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I was able to find a source that gave an average for sentence length in the english language of 14 words. I am curious as to what the standard deviation for that number is.

Also, I couldn't find any averages for how many sentences are in a paragraph. Again, I am also interested in knowing the standard deviation for that.

I know these averages can vary highly depending on the document.

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  • Please, can you share your source?
    – Claude COULOMBE
    Commented Sep 18, 2018 at 7:41
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    I’m voting to close this question because it requests resources.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Jun 4, 2022 at 18:01
  • Hi @EdwinAshworth, I am not quite sure what you mean by "it requests resources".
    – DudeOnRock
    Commented Jun 6, 2022 at 5:08
  • The results will be found, if anywhere, in an article or collection of statistics. If found, the answer will be there in black and white. So essentially, this is a request for a link to the appropriate article etc. But requests for resources are off-topic on ELU; this would be a better fit on ELU.Meta.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Jun 6, 2022 at 16:53

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This paper empirically fits a distribution to the sentence lengths in a variety of English and Greek works:

Sichel, HS. On a Distribution Representing Sentence-Length in Written Prose. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A (General) Vol. 137, No. 1 (1974), pp. 25-34

This in turn relies on two other papers that measured average word and sentence length in the works of Thomas Babington Macaulay, HG Wells, and GK Chesterton:

Williams, CB. A note on the statistical analysis of sentence-length as a criterion of literary style. Biometrika (1940), 31, 356-361.

Yule, GU. On sentence-length as a statistical characteristic of style in prose: with applications to two cases of disputed authorship. Biometrika (1939), 30, 363-390.

  • Thomas Babington Macaulay: mean sentence length 22.07 words, variance 230.22
  • HG Wells: mean 24.08, variance 199.38
  • GK Chesterton: mean 25.91, variance 131.05
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  • Have you tried more modern works? OP does not restrict the domain to even say 'fiction', and certainly not to pre-1937 works.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Jun 6, 2022 at 16:57

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