Topic 11 - Conversational structure and character (Session A) > Analysing Major Barbara > Task A

Analysing Major Barbara

Task A - Who has the longest turns?

The obvious way to answer this question is to count the words of each character and then divide the total by the number of turns that character has, to get an overall average. When we do such work it can also be worth noting the 'spread' from the average (what the statisticians call 'standard deviation'), in order to see whether each turn is near the average for the relevant character, or whether there are big variations caused by very long or very short turns (in which case it would be sensible to look at the deviations in a bit more detail). We won't actually calculate the standard deviation statistically here, but just note any big variations.

When you have calculated the averages and looked for deviations from the average, compare your findings with ours.

Our answer

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