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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

Essat Genome Project, evaluate essays, stylometry, subgenre

College

Humanities

Department

English

Abstract

This project utilized computational analysis to evaluate essays. Through stylometry, the study of writing style, the team studied essayists’ work to delineate writerly heritage, to identify potential authorship, and to recognize trends and answer questions about literary genre. From our analysis, we were able to identify preliminary points of demarcation among essayists due to style, time period, location, and subgenre. The primary subgenre which we examined over the course of the project was the “lyric essay,” a recently popular form which has uncertain characteristics we wanted to elucidate. As we examined essays classified as “lyric” we were able to corroborate and push against some of the characteristics currently believed to be features of the “lyric essay” in order to provide a more nuanced and precise understanding of the subgenre.

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