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Syntactic Surprise Calculator

If you use this website in your research, please cite our research:

A. Selin Atalay, Siham El Kihal, and Florian Ellsaesser (2023), “Creating Effective Marketing Messages Through Moderately Surprising Syntax”, Journal of Marketing https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429231153582

Copy and paste your text into the text box

The algorithm will analyze your text and measure the syntactic surprise and tell you:

  • What your syntactic surprise is
  • Whether your syntactic surprise is in the “effective” syntactic surprise range or whether you should modify the syntax of your text

How is the “effective” syntactic surprise range defined?

The “effective” range of syntactic surprise is defined based on a series of scientific studies conducted in various marketing contexts.

How is syntactic surprise measured?

In Atalay, El Kihal, & Ellsaesser (2023), you will find a detailed description of the origins and mathematical definition of syntactic surprise.