photo by Aehrich ó Dubhchon
For statistical purposes we randomly chose one page par chapter and counted the words, paragraphs and looked at other sifnificant aspects. Then we calculated the overall average. We used internet sources to interpret our results. On the homepage of the University of Idaho we found a definition of the diffculty of a text based on the number of words in a sentence. According to this definition the book “The Tortilla Curtain” is on the low “professor” text level, representing the most difficult kind of text.
But our rather subjective feeling is that this book is easy to read and not at all hard to understand. The majority of of the students in our class is of the same opinion.
This is a good example of the differences of educational standards in the world but it also shows us, that the average sentence length is not a sufficent criterion for the defenition of stylistic and linguistic complexity. One would have to use more factors like the number of borrowed words and the structure of the text which is not a matter of statistics.
But, it is still interesting to look at the statistics of this book. We can see certain continuity in numbers. There are no large differences between chapters and not even in the book as a whole. Only one criterion changes randomly, and that is the number of Spanish words employed. The author uses the Spanish language sporadically and not continously.
» Click here for the statistical findings
Further information and specific data on our research can be found by clicking on the link above.
Written and conducted by JÖRG DREXLER,
PETER GONSIOR and FLORIAN HESS