Was it annoying that I made the words Russia really big in my last essay? I was trying to convey the size of the impact of that word in the play Anastasia.
I’m thinking about the Mere Exposure Effect. As in, if we merely expose ourselves to a word “increases audience preference and affection” for that word. Robert Zajonk called it Attitudinal Effect in Mere Exposure in 1968. But! it looks researchers still like what he found. No correctors to his studies, just elaborations.
And! he studied the “musicality” of the word being presented!
Those are the top 25 words in Anastasia. When I originally went rooting around in the annals of digital humanities I found a lot of analysis of word count. At the time, I couldn’t really imagine how knowing how often a word is said would help us theater makers do a better job at staging a play.
Looking at the above does tell me this is a bit more of an “I’m” story than a “we’ll” story.
…would I have gotten that by reading the script? I hope so. But, I am …
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