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| One thing. Just one thing. |
The Telegraph in London reports that “Scientists
find secret to writing a best-selling novel.” Boy, was I eager to read that
story. What claptrap. It concludes by stating, “Previous work has attempted to
gain insights into the ‘secret recipe’ of successful books. But most of these
studies were qualitative, based on a dozen books, and focused primarily on
high-level content - the personalities of protagonists and antagonists and the
plots. Our work examines a considerably larger collection - 800 books - over
multiple genres, providing insights into lexical, syntactic, and discourse
patterns that characterize the writing styles commonly shared among the
successful literature.”
In other words, they counted the number of nouns,
conjunctions, and such. Yup, I’m sure that’s the trick—arithmetic. According to these scientists, bestsellers shun
action for introspective protagonists.
There used to be an old axiom of computing, GIGO, which
meant garbage in, garbage out. Computers are obedient creatures. They do what
they are told at the speed of light. If a scientist starts with faulty logic or
data, the results smell rank. There is some good news in the study. Since it
occurred in England, American tax dollars didn’t fund this particular busy-work.