A Stylometrical Analysis Of Principles Of Microeconomics And Its Implications For Writing

This thesis selects Mankiw's Principles of Microeconomics and analyzes its stylistic features through comparing it with the Principles of Microeconomics by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Carl E Wales with corpus-based method.It mainly uses corpus software of Antconc etc.to collect their linguistic features data from lexical,syntactic levels and studies their ways of explaining principles with intuition method.Features including most frequently used words,word-length,sentence-length,etc.are analyzed with the assistance of reading schema theory.According to the data collected and analyzed by Stata and Excel,it is found that though these two textbooks are different from each other at lexical and syntactic levels,differences at syntactic level are more prominent. Moreover,these two books are greatly different from each other in their ways of introducing principles.All theirs features verify the reasons of their degrees of popularity and the findings also give us implications that less word types,sentence length control,diversified sentence patterns,consistent readability of the whole book and examples close to daily life all contribute to the success of a good textbook.