#30 V̶ℓ
26.5% of occurrences of the period “.” occur in speech.
37.1% of occurrences of the comma “,” occur in speech.
67.1% of occurrences of the question mark “?” occur in speech.
75.1% of occurrences of the exclamation point “!” occur in speech.
The comma “,” occurs 5,715 times in Project Hail Mary: 1,835 times (32.1%) on the Earth timeline and 3,880 times (67.9%) on the Space timeline. (Overall, 29.9% of tokens are on the Earth timeline and 70.1% are on the Space timeline.)
The period “.” occurs 15,753 times in Project Hail Mary: 4,570 times (29.0%) on the Earth timeline and 11,183 times (71.0%) on the Space timeline.
The question mark “?” occurs 1,520 times in Project Hail Mary: 585 times (38.5%) on the Earth timeline and 935 times (61.5%) on the Space timeline.
The exclamation point “!” occurs 886 times in Project Hail Mary: 244 times (27.5%) on the Earth timeline and 642 times (72.5%) on the Space timeline.
Here’s a visualization of the relative frequencies across all sections and chapters of the book. The first shows question marks “?”, the second exclamation points “!”.
Each coloured bar represents a section and is colour-coded for Earth sections (green) and Space sections (purple).
The grey bars represent the chapters, which are marked with ticks and numbers.
The y-axis is the relative frequency, i.e. the proportion of tokens in that section (or chapter) that match the particular punctuation mark (so a bar might be higher, even with fewer occurrences, if the section or chapter is shorter).
The counts rely on the tokenization performed by the NLP library, spaCy.