Frictional Authors

Abstract: I present a method for text analysis based on an analogy with the dynamic friction of sliding surfaces. One surface is an array of points with a 'friction coefficient' derived from the distribution frequency of a text's alphabetic characters. The other surface is a test patch having points with this friction coefficient equal to a median value. Examples are presented from an analysis of a broad range of public domain texts, and comparison is made to the Flesch Reading Ease. Source code for the analysis program is provided.