Writing Prompts Analysis

By Oscar Ko

Writing prompts subreddit cover image

I scraped the top 1000 posts on the WritingPrompts subreddit. Conducting NLP (Natural Language Processing), I performed topic analysis and sentiment analysis on the scraped prompts.

  • What do the top prompts have in common?
  • Can they be separated into clusters?
  • What is the general sentiment of the top prompts?
  • Do Redditors prefer positive or negative prompts?

Topic Analysis

I performed topic analysis using LDA, and I grouped the prompts into three clusters. I removed all the words from R's list of common English stop words. I also removed these words because they kept appearing in multiple clusters: just, can, like, one, you're, get, find, day, human, humans, world, time, life, years, and now.

The repetition of those words suggests that the top writing prompts often deal with making discoveries (find), humanity (human, humans, world), time (time, years, now), and life (life).

With the clusters below, we get to see which common topics top prompts we might be able to group them into.

It seems the prompts that appeal most to Redditors involve mortality, society, or aliens!

Sentiment Analysis

For this next part, I ran a sentiment analysis on the words of each prompt to get the overall sentiment score. A positive sentiment score suggests the prompt might be related to happier and more optimistic emotions. A negative score suggests the opposite.

On the visualization below, squares below the green line show writing prompts with negative sentiment scores. The squares above the green line show writing prompts with positive sentiment scores.

The squares with darker shades show that there are more prompts of that sentiment score. (They are darker because each square is a prompt's sentiment score plotted, and they stack on top of each other if they have the same score resulting in a darker shade.)

It seems there is about the same amount of positive and negative sentiment scores with a slight lean toward the negative side.

Calculating all the sentiment scores together in R resulted in a total sentiment score of -0.614, which certainly is close to a neutral score of 0, but it is slightly negative.

Conclusions

It seems Redditors enjoy writing prompts that relate to mortality, society, and aliens with a slightly negative tone.