Bingöl University Journal of Social Sciences Institute

Abstract

In this study, quantitative features and readability of columns belong to 18 columnists who write for the newspapers having the highest circulation of Türkiye. 12262 columns published between the years 2017-2021 on the following topics: education, economy, health, sports and life were analysed with the developed software and Natural Language Processing techniques. Average number of sentences, words, syllables and letters of columns, average word number of sentences, average syllable and letter numbers of words were determined, and readability of texts were identified by Ateşman, Çetinkaya-Uzun and Bezirci-Yılmaz formulas, and the results were presented. Data obtained as a result of processing columns were evaluated in terms of category, newspaper and author.
The columns consist of averagely 42.08 sentences, 429.88 words, 1166.32 syllables and 2699.44 letters. Moreover, the average word number of sentences is 10.22, whereas the average syllable number of words is 2.71 and the average letter number of words is 6.28. The average readability of columns were as follows respectively according to Ateşman, Çetinkaya-Uzun and Bezirci-Yılmaz: 63.16 (medium difficulty), 38.40 (educational reading) and 11.87 (high school 11-12.class). According to Ateşman formula, the level of the columns was predominantly easy (43.91%), whereas there is no text at the level of very easy. According to Çetinkaya-Uzun, the columns were predominantly at the level of independent reading (69.32%). Furthermore, according to Bezirci-Yılmaz the texts were mostly at the level of secondary school (30.00%), high school (29.58%) and academic (27.81%), there is no text at the level of primary school 1-2.class
Average number of sentences is the only quantitative feature in which the difference is over 50% between the categories. Despite this, it was found out that the difference between newspapers and authors exceeds 50% in all quantitative features except average number of syllables and letters of words. It was seen that the difference in quantitative features was more evident in authors compared to category and newspaper. It was revealed that the newspaper has more decisive influence than the category, the author has more decisive influence than both the category and the newspaper in terms of readability in all 3 formulas. On the other hand, it was found out that 9 authors in 4 newspapers and 3 categories have been writing columns highly above the average educational level of Türkiye, at the undergraduate/academic level.