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When her hit “Crazy in Love” came out, people started questioning whether or not she had written the lyrics. How do we use statistics to determine if Beyoncé wrote the lyrics to “Crazy in Love”?

It is well known that different authors use different styles and word choice. It turns out that the average word length is fairly consistent for each author and can be used as a way to distinguish one author from another. Since we know for sure that Beyoncé wrote the lyrics for all of the Destiny’s Child songs (average word length 3.64), we should be able to determine her possible authorship of “Crazy in Love” by finding the average word length of “Crazy in Love.”

For a more detailed discussion of this activity, see the free lesson plan on Stats Medic.

Method #1: Sampling Five Words By Hand

Click words below to select a representative sample of five words. Once you've selected five, your results will be shown. Don't think too hard about it!

Select five words.

You're done!

Your sample average word length: ?

Let's see how the class did:

The true mean word length is 3.53. How did you do?

Can we do better?

Method #2: Simple Random Sample of Five Words

Sample average word length: ?

Method #3: Simple Random Sample of Twenty Words

Sample average word length: ?

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