The Common Style of Common Sense

The extraordinary impact of Thomas Paine's Common Sense has often been attributed to its style — to the simplicity and forcefulness with which Paine expressed ideas that many others before him had expressed. Comparative analysis of Common Sense and other pre-Revolutionary pamphlets suggests that Common Sense was indeed stylistically unique; no other pamphleteer came close to matching Paine's combination of simplicity and forcefulness.Lee Sigelman is Professor of Political Science at The George Washington University. His research interests range widely throughout the social sciences, including research methods, mass communication, political behavior, and political culture. He has recently published articles in Computers and the Humanities analyzing the work of Raymond Chandler and Edith Wharton.Colin Martindale is Professor of Psychology at the University of Maine. He is author of a number of articles and books on content analysis, literary history, and other topics. A recent book is The Clockwork Muse: The Predictability of Artistic Change (New York: Basic Books). He is Executive Editor of Empirical Studies of the Arts.Dean McKenzie is Professional Officer/Statistician for Psychological Medicine, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. He is author of several articles concerned with machine learning and artificial intelligence.