Rhetorical taboos: highly divergent terms by frequency score (FS)
| Plaintiffs’ attorneys will rarely say: | Defence attorneys will rarely say: | ||||||
| Defence | Plaintiffs | FS | Defence | Plaintiffs | FS | ||
| had the ability to quit | 241 | 2 | 0.01 | their product | 5 | 527 | 0.99 |
| (nothing the defendants) said or did | 220 | 4 | 0.02 | nicotine is not addictive* | 2 | 405 | 1.00 |
| plaintiff has to prove | 175 | 3 | 0.02 | they lied | 3 | 262 | 0.99 |
| (if you, the jury) get this far (in the verdict form) | 176 | 1 | 0.01 | addictive drug | 2 | 208 | 0.99 |
| smoking decisions | 137 | 2 | 0.01 | profits | 1 | 204 | 1.00 |
| her burden | 132 | 1 | 0.01 | their customers | 3 | 199 | 0.99 |
| warnings from | 108 | 1 | 0.01 | replacement smokers | 0 | 173 | 1.00 |
| chose to continue | 103 | 1 | 0.01 | own documents | 0 | 164 | 1.00 |
| knew that smoking was dangerous | 95 | 1 | 0.01 | would rely | 2 | 137 | 0.99 |
| decision to quit | 89 | 1 | 0.01 | more likely right than wrong | 0 | 124 | 1.00 |
P values <0.0001 for all FS.
This table contains expressions appearing at least 50 times more often in plaintiffs’ than in defence closings or vice versa, sorted by term frequencies. If scores for very similar expressions appeared in close proximity we selected the more expressive ones (eg, ‘had the ability to quit’ instead of ‘had the ability to’). Names of attorneys are excluded (‘Mr Bigger’, for example).
A score of 0.99 means that 99% of all instances of a given term will be in plaintiffs’ documents, with corpora normalised to have the same number of words.
* Plaintiffs’ attorneys often bring up the testimony of the seven cigarette CEOs in the 1994 Waxman hearings, where all seven maintained that ‘nicotine is not addictive’.