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Mama

  by Terry McMillan

(about 366 pages)
91,451
total words
58th PERCENTILE
of all the books in our library
51.00%
vividness
64th PERCENTILE
of all the books in our library
8.54%
passive voice
66th PERCENTILE
of all the books in our library
2.82%
all adverbs
42nd PERCENTILE
of all the books in our library
0.46%
ly-adverbs
3rd PERCENTILE
of all the books in our library
2.36%
non-ly-adverbs
91st 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
should’a kept your ass right out here in LA and you wouldn’t be in this situation. But I don’t want to pour salt on an open wound, so let me shut up.” “What’s this guy like that Angel’s marrying?” Mildred bit her lip. She forgot Money and Freda still didn’t know. Nobody had had the heart to tell them yet. All Doll had wanted to know was if he had any brothers. Bootsey was thrilled about the whole idea of it. “Ooooh weeee!” she’d said. “So now •We know who’s coming to dinner!” “He’s nice. His name is Ethan.” “What kind of work does he do?” “He’s in dental school at UCLA.” “I knew he had to have some money.” “Yeah, and he’s white, too.” “He’s what did you say? White?” “You heard me.” “You gotta be kidding, Mama.” “Naw, and don’t give me no long-ass speeches about the shit. I don’t want to hear it. He’s a good person, and he loves the hell out of Angel. I wouldn’t care what color he was, so long as he make her happy.” “This really takes the cake. A whitey? Do you realize what she’s about to do? She’s a traitor. If it weren’t for whiteys do you think I’d have gone to prison, among other things?” “Don’t try to hand me that bullshit. The white man didn’t tell you to get hooked on no damn heroin, did he? He didn’t make you rob no Howard Johnson’s, did he? Naw. That’s had never seen so much food in a refrigerator. There were pickles and olives, a big leafy head of lettuce, stacks and stacks of lunch meat, and three different kinds of bread. There was fresh fruit—oranges and apples and grapes. Everything was neatly housed in plastic containers. But there was something so orderly about this refrigerator, Freda didn’t feel comfortable about touching anything. Something was missing: it lacked a wholesome smell. She’d noticed it was missing in the rest of the house, too. That smell that meant somebody really lived here, tracked up the floors, burnt something on the stove every now and then. There was no smell of heat coming from the radiators, or any signs that rubber boots and wet mittens ever dried over them. Her own house smelled rich from fried chicken and collard greens and corn bread, from Pine-Sol and washing powder and Windex and Aero Wax and the little coned incense Mildred burned after she’d finished giving the house a good cleaning. Freda decided she wasn’t hungry and closed the refrigerator. Mildred hollered from the living room for her to go upstairs and start cleaning the bathroom. Freda slowly made her way up the winding staircase to the blue tiled bathroom in the hallway. The towels were folded neatly across the silver racks and looked like they had never been used. The blue bathtub was shining like a satin bedspread. Nothing in here needed cleaning. Freda pulled down her slacks to use the toilet

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 1829.02 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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other books by Terry McMillan

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