Even though the dialogue in the soap operas is scripted, we believe that it provides very useful insight into informal, colloquial American speech, and that it complements other similar corpora. For example, there are many informal phrases (see lists) and words (see lists) that are much more common in this corpus of soap operas than in the spoken portion of COCA and the BNC.

Conversely, there are many formal and more technical words in the spoken part of the BNC (see lists) and COCA (see lists) that are quite uncommon in this corpus of soap operas. This is because this corpus of soap operas deals more with everyday life and personal interaction than parts of COCA Spoken and BNC Spoken.