All entries for Thursday 05 November 2009

The Long Tale, a post script

At last, a truly happy ending!

Having heard a number of breathless tales of the visit of Mudimbe to the university, I checked out his stats on Amazon. Turns out The Invention of Africa doesn't do so badly in the Flesch stakes - it scores 19.9 which is just slightly (by a couple of percentiles) easier than Kant. Not too shabby, but check out this gem which is written by Richard E. Lee and edited by Mudimbe. It leaves Kant and everyone else in the dust, scoring 5.5 which puts it into the hardest percentile. Hurrah! Amazon further informs us that the book has a mean of 1.9 syllables per word, and 40.3 words per sentence. Is it even possible to write something with an average sentence length of over 40 words? Perhaps I shall try to write such a piece.

Colin Fallon : 05 Nov 2009 22:27 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem