Hunger Games - Catching Fire - A Textual Analysis of Suzanne Collins' Novels, and Twilight and Harry Potter Too

02/10/2015 Hunger Games: Catching Fire: A textual analysis of Suzanne Collins’ novels, and Twilight and Harry Potter too.
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Ever Wonder What the Most Popular Adjectives in the Hunger Games Trilogy Are? We Ran the
Numbers.
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Nov. 20 2013 11:51 PM
A Textual Analysis of The Hunger Games
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Suzanne Collins’ favorite adjectives, adverbs, and ways of
starting a sentence.
By Ben Blatt
Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) in The Hunger Games. She'll probably be “weak,”
“wild,” or “furious.”
Photo by Murray Close/Lionsgate, Inc.
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/11/hunger_games_catching_fire_a_textual_analysis_of_suzanne_collins_novels.html 1/7
This weekend, millions of preteens will flock to theaters to take in the Hunger Games sequel,
Catching Fire, just as millions of preteens flocked to each of the five Twilight movies. For the most
part, however, these will not be the same people. Of the tens of millions who identify themselves on
Facebook as fans of either of the two series, less than 20 percent are fans of both. Though both series
are set in fantasy worlds and feature female leads, readers and moviegoers seem to ally themselves
with either Team Stephenie or Team Suzanne, but not both.
Why might a reader take a shine to one series and not the other? The content, of course, differs
considerably: Twilight is filled with fantasy romance, Hunger Games with fantasy violence. But what
about the authors’ approach to writing? Do their word choices, sentence structures, and other elements
of their prose differ significantly? Is loving The Hunger Games but not Twilight a matter of style as
well as substance?
To answer this question, I could have read all of the books and offered my opinion on the authors’
respective styles. But that’s so unscientific. (Also, who has the time?) Instead, I conducted a
comprehensive textual analysis of the bestselling series. And to benchmark the comparison between
Meyer and Collins, I decided to throw into the mix another wildly popular young adult series: Harry
Potter by J.K. Rowling.
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“Textual analysis” sounds complicated, but it’s actually quite simple—a better term for it might be
“counting words.” In 1963, statisticians Frederick Mosteller and David Wallace published one of the
most famous “counting words” papers of all time when they determined, through analysis of word
frequencies, that James Madison most likely wrote 10 of the anonymously penned Federalist Papers.
Using similar methods, but with help from a modern computer, which makes the “counting” portions
of a “counting words” study much easier to perform, I conducted an equivalent analysis of the fantasy
series in question.
Once the words have been counted, the most obvious question to ask is: Which words are used most
frequently by each author? But this returns uninteresting results, as basic words like the, a, and and
turn up most often in every author's work. The more interesting question is not which words are used
most frequently, but which words are used most frequently in comparison to similar authors—that is,
which words are most distinctive to a given author’s work. While studying the Federalist Papers,
Mosteller and Wallace found that Hamilton used the conjunction while, as opposed to Madison, who
preferred whilst, a distinctive word choice that, in combination with others, could be used to tell the
writers apart. Below is a table listing the most distinctive adjectives used by Collins, Meyer, and
Rowling. Words that were used by only one author or less than 10 times total between the three
authors are not included in the lists, as they might only appear because they’re so rare, not because
they’re characteristic of an author’s writing.
And below is a list of most common ly adverbs by author.
These lists give us a sense of the authors’ respective proclivities and reflect the general tone of each
series. The Hunger Games is a technical dystopia relying on detailed descriptions of the action (thus
the prevalence of words like “intensely” and “electronic”). Twilight is wrapped up in emotion (thus
“anxiously,” “unwilling,” and “unreadable”—the last is typically used to describe a character’s
expression). Harry Potter is an exploration of a world by turns wondrous and frightening (thus
“dreamily,” “terrified”). Collins’ adjectives are often used in a utilitarian manner, to describe
processes (as in “One of the heaviest days of betting is the opening, when the initial casualties come
in.”). Meyer, meanwhile, is more likely to use her adjectives to describe people (as in “he asked in his
silken, irresistible voice”).
There are interesting patterns and contrasts among the authors to observe at the sentence level as well.
The table below shows the top 10 most used complete sentences by each author.
Textual analysis has its limitations, of course, but word counting can illuminate the tendencies of
writers in a way that word reading may not. Not all of Collins’ tics will be on display in this
weekend’s movie version, but if you go, don’t be surprised if you see Katniss “repeatedly” make
“lastditch” efforts to save her skin when “something is wrong.”
Top Comment
Reading the most common sentences from each author is hilarious. More...
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Of course, each series is made up of individual books, and there are variations within a series as well.
Applying the same methodology to just the Hunger Games trilogy, I isolated the most distinctive
adjectives for each of the three books. What I found was a transition from “weak,” “wild,” and
“furious” in The Hunger Games (in which Katniss must endure the Hunger Games competition) to
“mental,” “physical,” and “ridiculous” in Catching Fire (in which Katniss must handle both a second
competition and a rebellion) to “glad,” “lucky,” and “funny” in Mockingjay (in which Katniss
struggles through a series of unfortunate events but ultimately finds a measure of peace). In other
ways, however, Collins’ books are remarkably consistent: The three books have a word count of
roughly 101,200, 101,900, and 102,700, indicating she sticks to a precision formula for young adult
success. By comparison, none of the four Twilight books have a word count within 10,000 words of
one another, and the last Harry Potter book is more than twice as long as the first.
Like the distinctive word lists, these sentences suggest something about each author’s style.
Rowling’s betray her reliance on suspense: “Harry looked around,” “He waited,” “Harry stared.” (A
list of her most frequently used sentences could be repurposed into a script for an absurdist play called
Waiting for Voldemort.) Meyer’s sentences—“I sighed,” “He sighed”—show a text focused on the
emotional lives of her characters. Collins’ declarative sentences telegraph her books’ relatively spare
descriptions of the action.
Looking at Meyer’s sentences, you get the sense that she may be using similar sentences again and
again—a pitfall, perhaps, of writing a series of such length. To determine the relative repetitiveness of
each author, I first made a list of the 50 most common threeword sentence openings each author used
throughout her work. For example, Collins’ three most common openings were “I can see,” “I try to,”
and “I have to.” Then I calculated the percentage of all sentence openings (not necessarily the whole
sentence) that come from each author's most used opening list:
J.K. Rowling: 2.35 percent
Suzanne Collins: 2.69 percent
Stephenie Meyer: 4.42 percent
Clearly, Meyer’s sentence variety is lacking compared to Collins and Rowling. But in her defense,
repeatedly starting sentences off the same way doesn’t mean the prose is bad—it just means it’s
repetitive. Hemingway uses the same 50 openings (“There was a,” “He did not”) in 5.3 percent of all
sentences in The Sun Also Rises.
Also in Slate, Miriam Krule explains the meaning behind all the crazy names in the first two
Hunger Games books.
Ben Blatt is a Slate contributor and coauthor of I Don't Care if We Never Get Back. Follow him on
Twitter.
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