534 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



THE SHEKMAN PEINCIPLE IN KHETOEIC AND ITS 



EESTEICTIONS. 



By Dr. ROBERT E. MORITZ, 



UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA. 



Tj^IFTEEN years ago, Professor L. A. Sherman, of the University of 

 -'- Nebraska, while investigating the sentence-lengths used by early 

 and modern English writers, noticed that in the works which he ex- 

 amined each author manifested an average sentence-length, which he 

 inferred to be characteristic of the author. Consecutive hundreds of 

 periods were averaged with respect to the number of words per sen- 

 tence and the mean of five or more of these averages was taken to repre- 

 sent approximately the average sentence-length used by the author. It 

 was found that the averages for separate hundreds generally varied by 

 less than 20 per cent, from the total average of 500 to 1,000 sentences. 

 The 2,225 periods of De Quincey's 'Opium-Eater' averaged 33.65 ± 



6.64 words per sentence, where the number 6.64 indicates the largest 

 number of words by which the averages of individual hundreds differ 

 from the average 33.65. Similarly 722 periods from Macaulay's 

 'Essay on History' yielded 23 rb 3.35 words per sentence, 750 periods 

 from Channing's 'Self-Culture' 25.35 zb 1.45, 732 periods from Emer- 

 son's 'American Scholar' and the 'Divinity School Address' 20.71 =t 



2.65 and 805 periods from Bartol's 'Eadicalism' and 'Father Taylor' 

 gave an average of 16.63 zb 2.35 words per sentence. These results led 

 to the suspicion that stylists are 'subject to a rigid rhythmic law from 

 which even by the widest range and variety of sentence length and 

 form they may not escajDC. ' Averages from other authors were made 

 with similar results. A culminating test was furnished by actually 

 counting the words in each of the 41,500 periods in the five volumes 

 of Macaulay's 'History of England' with the resulting average of 

 23.43 ±7.11. The conclusion was that writers who have achieved a 

 style are governed by a constant sentence rhythm, which will generally 

 be revealed by an examination of 300 periods. 



Encouraged by these results. Professor Sherman induced Mr. Ger- 

 wig, then a student at the University of Nebraska, to examine other 

 stylistic peculiarities. This Mr. Gerwig did by determining the av- 

 erage number of predications per sentence and the percentage of simple 

 sentences used by one hundred different authors. His conclusions are 

 summed up in the following words : " A very little investigation served 

 to convince me that the same remarkable uniformity which had been 



