This is incredibly damning, if true:Â
As Yavelow explains, authors don’t go from a 3.8 percent use of the passive voice in 1995 to an 8.3 percent use in 2006. For developing writers, the use of the passive almost always diminishes with experience.
Yavelow cites a score of other characteristics that change too conspicuously from one Obama book to the next, among them the Flesch Reading Ease score, the use of gender words, sentence starters, adverbs, discouraged words, sensory triggers, and more.
When, however, Yavelow compared Obama’s Dreams with Bill Ayers’ memoir, Fugitive Days, he found the similarity of the two books “striking.†He then quickly corrects himself: “’Striking’ is an understatement for the relationship FictionFixer uncovered between Fugitive Days and Dreams From My Father.â€
For instance, Dreams averages 17.61 words and 26.48 syllables for non-dialogue sentences. Fugitive Days averages 17.62 words and 26.27 syllables.
Another example is what Yavelow calls “attributionsâ€â€”e.g., he “asked,†she “said,†they “wondered.†Some authors use as few as three. Many use fewer than twenty. Dreams, however, uses 36; Fugitive Days 34, and with only four exceptions—three of these used only once—the two books use the very same attributions.
Like most, I had assumed the Ayers ghostwriting rumor was a wacky right-wing conspiracy theory, but (again, if true) this seems to stretch coincidence well past the breaking point. There’s much, much more at the link.
 (Via Ace)
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deep breaths dave.
It’s a fairly rigorous analysis, with several independent teams coming to the same conclusion.Â
Maybe you need a few deep breaths yourself, and to read the article before judging it.
What needs to happen is to give, say, a couple hundred randomly chosen authors (plus Ayers)for the software to look at and see how effective it is at picking out Ayers from the group. When it has a 90% certainty of picking Ayers work *and* identifies Obama’s book as Ayer’s, then I’ll be impressed.
Ryan
RyanR’s last blog post..Faces of Math
RyanR,
They pretty much did almost exactly that.
team based at a large state university, who have chosen to remain anonymous to keep their jobs, came to the same conclusion Gold did. “Under the Q-value statistic,†they contend, “segments of Dreams consistently compared as well with Fugitive segments as it did with other segments of Dreams itself. In contrast, Dreams compared poorly with other documents.â€
Using the chi-square statistic,†they add, “Obama’s and Ayers’s books were indistinguishable while Obama’s book was easily distinguishable from books by other authors.â€
Not all experts agree, for whatever it’s worth:
http://www.philocomp.net/humanities/dreams
It’d be interesting if someone could get a handle on the financial side of it. If Ayers ghostwrote the book, presumably either Obama or the publisher paid him something.Â
I expect that SOMEbody ghostwrote Obama’s book. Celebrities and politicians often avail themselves of such services.
I went back and re-read the criticisms at philocomp.net. The most obvious problem with these analyses is the choice of controls. C’mon, a memoir by_ Ulysses S. Grant _ and a novel from 1919? I would find this much more convincing if the controls were memoirs from a similar period. I’ve got an open mind about this, it doesn’t seem to me ridiculous to ask the question, but it looks hinky if you have to choose obviously inappropriate controls to make the two test cases look a lot alike.
There’s another explanation for the similarities of style.
It’s difficult to tell my technical documents from ones written by the guy who taught me technical writing.
BWAHAHAHAHA
Isn’t statistical document analysis a well-developed science which has been used to figure out who wrote which Federalist Paper and who wrote which book of the Bible?
I googled all three "experts" cited in the article. Yavelow sounds like a smart guy, but not an expert in this field. Longman’s too biased to be credible on this issue. Ed Gold has too common a name for me to figure out who he is. And the article comes from WorldNetDaily, which is about as independent and reliable as Daily Kos.
The raw data in the article is interesting, and makes a decent case for what sounds on the surface like a nutty conspiracy theory, but I need more evidence before I’m prepared to start believing it.
That being said, I’m voting for McCain. There’s plenty of other reasons to vote against Obama even if he wrote his own memoirs (and yes, it is tacky that he has memoirs this early in his career, but that’s not deciding my vote either).
They’re comparing segments. That has cherry picking written all over it. If I can pick all the highly correlated segments, then I can make anybody similar to anybody. Lord knows I have my British moments, mainly from reading a lot of C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, but I’m very much Californian. Us the whole work, or have an objective metric to choose the segments. Even picking the segments before the analysis won’t cut it, since the examiners can easily build their unconsious bias into the segments that they pick. I wouldn’t put it past Obama, but I’m still not convinced.
Ryan
RyanR’s last blog post..Faces of Math
Pretty funny how some people seem to be passing judgement on the credibility of these "experts". Sorry, but doesn’t it take another "expert" to debate the merits of another ?
I find it intriguing, nothing more. But far be it from me to stop anyone from "debunking" experts in literary structure analysis.Â
LOL
deadrody,
If only an expert can evaluate an expert, how is a non-expert supposed to use expert advice when experts disagree?
I don’t think it takes an expert to realize that when you compare two contemporary works, written five years apart by people who live in the same community, it’s not shocking when they’re more alike than either is like a memoir written in 1885.Â
*yawn*
Deadrody (if your comment was directed at me), I was critiquing his statistical methodology and analysis. Anybody with a scientific background can do that. Sample size and investigator bias is Science 101.
Ryan
RyanR’s last blog post..Faces of Math
deadrody,did you bother reading elizabeth’s link where, in fact, a bona fide expert begged to differ?
Then you clearly don’t really read or understand WorldNetDaily. I’ve cited them often and each and every time their news has been solid. I’ve even gone so far to appease people like you as to find sources you would accept to backup a WND piece. And that you even go so far as to compare WND to DK makes pretty plain you don’t really know anything about either.
William Ayers has written quite a lot of other things. I wonder how much consistency there is from sample to sample within Ayers’ work?Â
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