Russell Lynes was editor of Harper's Magazine for twenty years beginning in 1947. His quote, "Every journalist has a novel inside of him, which is an excellent place for it," may be the starting point for the more positive thought "that everyone has a book inside."
I certainly believe all of us have a book inside. Many of us die without it being written. Some of us write it and wonder if perhaps Lynes was correct. Regardless, it is there, waiting to be written.
Adding to this basic idea, three physicists, Sebastian Bernhardsson, Luis Enrique Correa da Rocha, and Petter Minnhagen just published a study in New Journal of Physics about how many different words authors use when writing and whether or not an analysis of the frequency of new words used by an author might reveal an author's "word signature."
The science behind the analysis is beyond the scope of this blog. So read the paper if you are into that. The idea these physicists were exploring was Zipf's law, a seventy-five year old theorem that states if you take a natural language the most frequently uttered word will appear twice as often as the next most frequently uttered word which will appear twice as frequently as the third most uttered word, and so on.
But what about how frequently someone utters new words? These researchers examined the works of D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, and Herman Melville. And they examined not just their novels, but their shorter written works, including personal letters. What they found was that individual authors used unique (or new) words at a different rate from each other, basically giving each author a signature that appears just from analyzing word frequency. The authors hypothesis (which they found was true) was:
"The writing of a text can be described by a process where the author pulls a peice of text out a a large mother book (the meta book) and puts it down on paper. This meta book is an imaginary infinite book that gives a representation of the word-frequency characteristics of everything that a certain author would ever think of writing. This has nothing to do with semantics and the actual meaning of what is written, but rather concerns the extent of the vocabulary, the level and type of education, and the personal preferences of an author. The fact that people have such different backgrounds, together with the seemingly different behavior of the function N(M) for the different authors, opens up the speculation that everyone has a personal and unique meta book, in which case it can be seen as an author's fingerprint."
Mathematical evidence that the book inside you, regardless of how familiar the content, will contain your unique voice.
good health for you
In my opinion. You were mistaken.
http://casinoflash.1a.lc/in/70/index.html - will to win 182
G'night
Posted by: DresBruirlTes | 11 August 2010 at 10:09 AM