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Lucky, Isabel J.

During my interdisciplinary undergraduate degree, I decided to use statistical techniques to analyze my Creative Writing habits as a way to blend my main areas of study. I also hoped to test predictions about myself (i.e. balance and representation in my songwriting craft). I summarized structure, point of view (POV), approximate song duration, modulation, whether a song was autobiographical or not of 14 songs that I have written. I then used Google Sheets and R-Studio to conduct the necessary statistical tests, i.e. Chi-Square (𝝌 2 ) Goodness Of Fit (GOF), Chi-Square (𝝌 2 ) Contingency Analysis (CA), Fisher’s Exact Test (FET), 1-sample t-test, 2-sample t-test, single-factor ANOVA, Kruskal-Wallis, and Tukey Kramer HSD. The data on each categorical variable (i.e. POV, modulation, and whether a song was autobiographical or not) rejected their respective null hypotheses (p < .01). The data on approximate song duration as well as its relationships with each categorical variable failed to reject the null hypotheses of the required statistical tests (p > .05). Among the categorical variables, the only non-independent pair was POV and whether a song was autobiographical (p = .007). My predictions were supported by the results. Since this is a follow-up to a paper where I looked at how statistics could be applied to my fictional stories, I elaborate further on how the application of statistics to Creative Writing can help any writer (myself included) better assess their habits and note potential aspects of their work than can be further diversified.

Text

2023-10-19

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/86208

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/