The narrative arc : exploring the linguistic structure of narrative

Over the millennia, philosophers and scholars have theorized on the building blocks of narrative. Until now, a reliable methodology to quantitatively investigate narrative structure has not been unavailable. The Narrative Arc Theory (NAT) was developed to investigate whether or not a common structure existed for narratives. To do this, the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) text analysis program was used on a corpora composed of over 5,000 narratives. A five equal sized parts segmentation strategy was developed to track how narratives develop. Simple word count analyses of function and emotion words identified five common narrative dimensions that were shared across diverse narrative text.