Predictability as related to style

Randomly chosen brief samples of language from the manuscripts of speeches by Rufus Choate, his contemporaries, and our contemporaries are compared. The principal tool is a generously modified version of Shannon's letter‐prediction procedure. The modification becomes a language‐prediction procedure in which university students, singly, guess successive words and are corrected with successive letters. The generating process is treated as tracking a sequence of prose and likened to a listener's role in “communication in process.” Choate's phrases were less predictable than the others, suggesting a greater surprise‐element for the listener. This quality, in turn, has been lauded by rhetoricians as a desirable property of style.