Single-Sentence Stories, Part II: Sentence of Dave, and a Math Problem About Literature

Cuing off Zed's sly tip-of-the-cap post yesterday, I thought I'd take us all there more fully. You know, a ham-fisted sequel after a cleverly crafted original.

So, as of today, Dave has written 6,365 posts at Sentence of Dave. As such, presumably he has written 6,365 sentences.

6,365 sentences. Wow.

Except... do you guys remember his existential crisis where he went over to that Park the Bus site and wrote lots of sentences and said goodbye to SoD and then a year later or so came back and just picked the old site right back up New Coke Bobby Ewing style?

What was that about? We're going to call that period his "Lost Weekend" a la John Lennon and go with the 6,365 sentences. Moving right along...

So… has Dave written the equivalent of a novel?

Of course it would be a rambling, hard-to-follow novel. I contend that it would be no harder to follow than Faulkner's novels for me when I read them in high school, or Dave when he's rambling at the Fishing Trip after Tortuga's and some afternoon fun. 

How can we simply evaluate if he's written and published (in blogform) as much as a novel over these 18 years?

AI says that: 

• "Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities contains an estimated 6,400 to 7,400 sentences, based on an approximate word count of 135,000 to 140,000 and the typical long-winded Victorian sentence length of around 19 to 22 words per sentence. For instance, the famous opening line alone runs 119 words long, which is very SoDomish and perhaps Dave's original inspiration."
• "Based on the novel's total word count, To Kill a Mockingbird contains an estimated 6,800 to 7,500 sentences. Total Word Count: The novel has approximately 100,000 words. Average Sentence Length: Standard 20th-century American fiction typically averages 13 to 15 words per sentence. BTW, Dave = Boo Radley."
• "Mark Twain’s American classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn contains an estimated 5,300 to 5,800 sentences. While Mark Twain's prose is highly conversational and written in Huck's unique colloquial voice, his narrative sentences tend to be longer and more fluid than modern fiction, often linking multiple clauses with conjunctions like "and". However, this is balanced out by rapid-fire, localized dialogue between Huck and other characters along the Mississippi River, bringing the statistical average down to about 20 words per sentence. Also, Dave has never used racist vulgarities in SoD."
• "An analysis of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath estimates the sentence count to be between 11,000 and 15,000 sentences. While it is a massive, sweeping novel, its total sentence count is incredibly high because Steinbeck’s sentence-level complexity is uniquely low. Like SoD, it's also super uplifting."
• “An analysis of Ernest Hemingway's modernist classic The Sun Also Rises estimates the sentence count to be between 5,600 and 6,800 sentences, similar to SoD in the way that Jake Barnes is similar to Dave in his sexual virility."

So Dave has worked harder than Twain, nearly as hard as Dickens and Harper Lee, and he’s halfway to Steinbeck. (“Halfway to Steinbeck”… a podcast episode or Random Idiots song title if there ever was one.)

Dave is pretty much Ernest Hemingway. Papa Pellicane strikes again.

Here’s the thing, though. Those authors didn’t work as hard per sentence. Not nearly!

Only the people highlighted in Zman’s recommended Totei article “The Strange Allure of the Single-Sentence Novel” have! Faulkner and his 1,288-word sentence in Absalom, Absalom!, or Joyce and his 4,391-word sentence in Ulysses. (Joyce’s has to be the Lou Gehrig record of his time… and maybe Dave can be Cal Ripken.)

So, in order to do comparative math, we need to know how long the average SoD entry is, wordwise. How do we figure that?

We’re in luck, Super Sleuths! My buddy Arch the AI Archivist gave me this to work with:

If your goal is “give me a defensible ballpark, not a dissertation,” I think we can get there without turning this into the Human Genome Project.

From the archive material I can actually inspect, my best current estimate is:

 An average Sentence of Dave post is probably about 200–250 words.

If you made me put one number on it right now, I'd use ~225 words per post.

I also think the median is appreciably lower — probably around 150–175 words. That's because Dave's distribution is extremely lopsided: there are lots of short posts, but then occasional 500-, 700-, or 1,000-word Dave extravaganzas drag the arithmetic mean upward. You can see that variation directly in the archives: 2010 has compact posts alongside very long one-sentence narratives, while 2024 likewise jumps between tiny entries and several-hundred-word stories. And contemporary Dave does appear wordier.

I'd put a fairly broad uncertainty band around it — say ±50 words — until we've done a genuine large sample. But I'm much more comfortable with 225 now than with my original 150–200 guess.

Oh, and then there's this exchange:

Anyway, I’m actually content to know how much Dave has written, guesstimate-style (like most of my college exam submissions), so let’s do this.  

Holy crap. Sentence of Dave is 5 times wordier than that relative leaflet Ulysses! 

I know, my Math about his English a bit dicey in its precision, but it’s on the right track. Dave’s collective work doesn’t qualify for Single-Sentence Novel acclaim, because, like the unluckiest gal I know, he’s had over 6,000 periods… but if we could tap a few keystrokes and make them all semi-colons… oh, boy. 

Let's face it. Dave is Cal. 

[This is not helping my case with my hometowners that W&M people aren’t nerds.]