Question 6.77

6.77 Who is the author?

Statistics can help decide the authorship of literary works. Sonnets by a certain Elizabethan poet are known to contain an average of new words (words not used in the poet’s other works). The standard deviation of the number of new words is . Now a manuscript with five new sonnets has come to light, and scholars are debating whether it is the poet’s work. The new sonnets contain an average of words not used in the poet’s known works. We expect poems by another author to contain more new words, so to see if we have evidence that the new sonnets are not by our poet, we test

Give the test statistic and its -value. What do you conclude about the authorship of the new poems?

6.77

. -value (< 0.0002). The new poems are by another author.