Who Was Ouintus Curtius Snodgrass--论文代写范文精选

51due论文代写网精选代写范文：" Who Was Ouintus Curtius Snodgrass "。本篇论文主要是有一个关于马克吐温在内战中的作用历史辩论。作者认为这个历史辩论存在怀疑的地方，有人是用了模仿的手法来冒充，于是提出几点关于如何辩论其作品真伪的建议。

There is a historical debate about the role of Mark Twain in the Civil War. During 1861, a set of ten letters signed Ouintus  Curtius Snodgrass had appeared in the New Orleans Daily Crescent. The letters purported to Twain’s military achievements as a member of the Louisiana milita. While historians generally agree that the accounts referred to actually did happen, there seems to be no record of anyone named Quintus Curtius Snodgrass.(Larsen & Stroup 1976) The hypothesis is that Twain and Snodgrass could have been the same person.

In order to investigate this matter, one of the best ways is to examine both of their writings. Firstly, we need to carefully choose their sample writings, and examine word length frequencies. This approach would possibly give a view if Twain and Snodgrass are the same because g[a] given author will use roughly the same proportion of, say, three-letter words in something he writes this year as he did in whatever he wrote last year .But, the proportion of three-letter words that Author A consistently uses will very likely be different than the proportion of three-letter words that Author B uses. Theoretically, then, by constructing a word-length frequency count for essays known to be written by Mark Twain and comparing that to a similar count made for the Snodgrass letters, it should be possible to assess the likelihood of the two authors being one and the same. (Larsen & Stroup 1976) The great difference of the word frequency distributions for two sets of writings would be enough evidence that different people wrote the two sets. On the other hand, it does not prove that the same person writes those two writings even if the distributions are quite similar because it is very possible for two different authors to write in similar styles.

Next approach is to examine Chi-square that a standard statistical procedure for measuring the difference between two frequency distributions. In the case of these word frequencies, a Chi-square of at least 46.9 gives us confidence within 0.5% that the observed differences are real. The writing samples of Twain are chosen regarding Snodgrass; One set of the Twain letters was written before, one during, and one after the time of the Snodgrass letters. Table 1 shows the word-length distributions and the relative frequencies for three sets of letters by Twain (Sample 1, 2 and 3) and the ten Snodgrass letters (Sample 4). Examining three charts of relative frequencies of Twain’s samples (chart 1, 2 and 3), those tendencies are quite similar. Table 2 shows actual and relative frequencies of Twain’s combined samples to compare it with Snodgrass sample. Charting their relative frequencies on the same graph (chart 4), slight difference of those tendencies between word-length 2 and three is observed. Furthermore, final Chi-square statistic, the difference between two frequency distributions, gets 126.930 (table 4); whereas Chi-squares of each Twain’s sample as measured against each of the other Twain’s samples are 15.702, 24.160 and 16.290 (table 8).

Final Chi-square 126.930 is far greater than 46.9, and it shows that there is only 0.5% of possibility that writings of Twain and Snodgrass are written by the same author. In conclusion, from this investigation’s view, Twain and Snodgrass seem more likely different person though the possibility that they are the same always remains.-M

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