Project draft proposal

Student’s name: John Doe

Title:

Bernard Shaw: A case study of style in fiction and drama.

Research question(s):

Are Shaw’s styles identical when writing fiction and plays? If they are different, what are the most outstanding differences? Did Shaw’s style change with time?

Objectives:

To determine whether there are remarkable differences between Shaw’s styles in drama and fiction or not.

To determine whether Shaw’s style underwent essential changes along his life. To get further insight into measurable differences in style across genres.

Hypotheses:

Shaw had a unique style in his writings (null). Stylometric methods are enough for profiling differences across registers.

Methodology:

Two plays (Mrs. Warren's Profession and Pygmalion), a novel (Love Among the Artists) and several short stories (from The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God and Some Lesser Tales) will be stylistically analysed and compared.

The texts will be collected, pre-processed and saved in text format. They will be analysed using Textalyser and other on-line stylometry tools. Results will be tabulated in sqlite and Access. Quantitative data will be processed and summarised using Excel.