The Linguistics of ReTweets | Dan Zarrella

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Posted on Jul 1st, 2009 | 28 comments so far.

Great analysis; would be good to get significance levels of your various findings, though. Is a difference in reading grade level of 6.47 years of education and 6.04 years statistically significant? How much so? (I would imagine all this stuff has a low p value because of the largeness of the sample, but I just dont know)

Sorry to nitpick, all in all this looks like an awesome project.

Interesting stuff, I would also think it could informational to look at the retweets as sorted by the number of times they are retweeted, split them into X parts, and then run these analyses on those different parts to see how the reading level, word usage, and other choices affect the effectiveness of the continued transmission of the message.

Great stuff Dan. I think, maybe it’s a bit too much analysis;-), but useful information to have.

The SUCCESS acronym from Made To Stick, I’ve found anyway, helps a great deal in getting a message re-tweeted (for what it’s worth).

When you quote stats for “retweets,” are you referring to the actual retweet, or the original tweet that got retweeted?

As a fairly frequent retweeter, I’m sure the actual retweets have higher linguistic complexity, by any measure: it’s a real struggle to squeeze in any thought of your own along side a pruned-down copy of the original, and yet stay within the magical 140! But that obviousness makes stats on the fact less interesting (to me, at any rate). If your data mean “a tweet is more likely to be retweeted if it has higher linguistic complexity,” I _would_ find that surprising, interesting, and possibly useful!

Your corpus refers only to English language tweets? Do you assess the native language or ...

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http://danzarrella.com/retweet-linguistics.html

http://danzarrella.com/retweet-linguistics.html