Does Beyoncé Write Her Own Lyrics?

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.