More Periods + Fewer Syllables = Bigger Royalty Check?
Steven Johnson plays with Amazon.com‘s ‘text stats’ feature and compares himself to some other nonfiction writers in terms of sentence length and the complexity of their vocabulary. As it turns out, he and Steven Pinker and Christopher Hitchens are all writing in about the same ballpark—it’s the cluster of bluish, dottish points in the graph below, which you can click to enlarge—”but even in that cluster, each author’s books are closer to his other books than they are to the other two author’s books,” Johnson observes. “In other words, each of us has a certain sweet spot of complexity that we come back to book after book.”
Then he notices that Malcolm Gladwell‘s sentences are “fully 25% shorter,” and muses, “Clearly, the only things separating me from selling ten million copies of my books are those extra 6.5 words per sentence.”
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