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Mediocre

  by Ijeoma Oluo

(about 333 pages)
83,209
total words
46th PERCENTILE
of all the books in our library
31.88%
vividness
10th PERCENTILE
of all the books in our library
7.14%
passive voice
24th PERCENTILE
of all the books in our library
2.66%
all adverbs
30th PERCENTILE
of all the books in our library
1.14%
ly-adverbs
66th PERCENTILE
of all the books in our library
1.51%
non-ly-adverbs
9th PERCENTILE
of all the books in our library

clippings from this book

We’ve analyzed hundreds of millions of words, from thousands of different authors, training our linguistic models to recognize the most vivid words in the English language… the words that create the most intense sensory experiences: colors, textures, sounds, flavors, and aromas.

Based on our analysis, we’ve scanned through the pages of this book to find the two pages at the extremes, both the most-passive and the most-vivid pages, so that you can compare them side-by-side and see the difference:

MOST PASSIVE PAGE
MOST VIVID PAGE
would like to see more than a few movies in my lifetime. I have had to find a way to work in offices that don’t see me as management material while still believing that there is a chance I can get a promotion anyway. I’ve had to study history that erased my culture from its pages and know that it did not actually erase me. I’ve had to learn laws that weren’t written to serve me. I’ve had to learn to write and appreciate words in a language that was forced on my ancestors. Not only have things in America not been built for me; they have never been built for me. And although that has been physically, financially, politically, and psychologically disastrous for my community, I have come to see that it is also damaging to be led to believe that everything should be built for you and that anything built with the consideration of others is inherently harmful to you. It is harmful to the individual who believes it, and it is harmful to every system they interact with that is supposed to be built on coalition. In the lead-up to the 2020 election, as with the 2016 election, we were drowning in talk of how we were going to make working- and middle-class white men feel included in order to defeat conservative forces. But I must honestly ask: What exactly do people who aren’t white men have that could be more inclusive of white men? We do sturdy, rough clothing that the rest of the cavalry wore and into his costume. Dressed in black velvet pants and a red silk shirt trimmed with silver buttons, Cody rode out to meet fame and fortune. The fight itself was unextraordinary. Cody’s men exchanged shots with the Cheyenne warriors. Cody and one Cheyenne warrior fired at each other, the warrior just missing Cody, and Cody shooting the warrior in the leg and felling his horse. Then Cody’s horse tripped in a hole and went down too. Cody and the warrior both took aim again, and Cody once again proved the better shot, killing Hay-o-wei, his adversary. The name Hay-o-wei translates to “Yellow Hair,” which the young warrior was named due to his blonde hair. Yellow Hair was not a war chief; he was just a warrior of no particular rank. The entire confrontation was over in a few minutes. The rest of the Cheyenne warriors fled the scene, and as Cody’s men left in pursuit, Cody walked over to Yellow Hair’s body, scalped the dead warrior, and took his warbonnet and weapons as trophies. According to Cody, he thrust the scalp in the air and shouted, “The first scalp for Custer!” Nobody else at the skirmish remembered him doing that. None of the warriors that the men fought had been at the battle of Little Big Horn or had likely ever encountered Custer. Within a week of his killing Yellow Hair, stories of Cody’s bravery under fire began to reach

emotional story arc

Click anywhere on the chart to see the most significant emotional words — both positive & negative — from the corresponding section of the text…
This chart visualizes the the shifting emotional balance for the arc of this story, based on the emotional strength of the words in the prose, using techniques pioneered by the UVM Computational Story Lab. To create this story arc, we divided the complete manuscript text into 50 equal-sized chunks, each with 1664.18 words, and then we scored each section by counting the number of strongly-emotional words, both positive and negative. The bars in the chart move downward whenever there’s conflict and sadness, and they move upward when conflicts are resolved, or when the characters are happy and content. The size of each bar represents the positive or negative word-count of that section.

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