Here’s Missouri, BUT every state looks the same - a sea of red with a few blue dots. You see vast stretches of land where there’s nothing. When you fly over it, you don’t see red states AND blue states. AND the same really could be said for America. That’s powerful.ĪND finally … if you want to understand why america is so divided, don’t talk about Republicans AND Democrats, or red states AND blue states, read the story about The City Mouse AND the Country Mouse, currently being sold under the new title, What Happened? BUT the original is about two mice who learn that you’re either one or the other, city or country. There were 10 BUTs, 23 ANDs, which means a Narrative Index of 43. Also, just to show you in detail how the pattern works, below is the transcript of last Friday night’s monologue with all the BUTs and ANDs colored. For a while HBO provided the transcripts on their websites. Telephone books would score even lower.Īt the other end are Bill Maher’s monologues. Not surprisingly, they hardly ever present narrative content. At one end are equipment maintenance manuals. In the graph above you see a range of values. I’ve been measuring the Narrative Index for hundreds of texts over the past two years. They represent two of the three fundamental forces of narrative (agreement, contradiction, consequence). AND is the most common word of agreement, BUT is the most common word of contradiction. These are the two fundamental words of narrative.

I derived it from the ABT which arose from the Rule of Replacing I learned from the South Park creators. It’s just the ratio of all the BUTs to ANDs in a given text. It’s a metric so simple that it’s beneath the dignity of serious text analysis jockeys, but it’s also very profound in what it reveals.

It’s also because Bill communicates with strong narrative content, as revealed by the Narrative Index. Wanna know why Donald Trump hates Bill Maher? It’s not just because Bill suggested he was descended from an orangutan.

Bill maher monologue