Computer scientists quantify elements of writing style that differentiate successful fiction

http://phys.org/news/2014-01-scientists ... tiate.html

Excerpt: "Statistical stylometry is the statistical analysis of variations in literary style between one writer or genre and another. The study reports, for the first time, that the discipline can be effective in distinguishing highly successful literature from its less successful counterpart, achieving accuracy rates as high as 84%.

For example, the research indicated that more successful books make more frequent use of discourse connectives (conjunctions such as "and", "but", "or") to join sentences and prepositions. Prepositions, nouns, pronouns, determiners (words that precede nouns to indicate whether the noun is specific or general, e.g. "your letter"), and adjectives are also predictive of highly successful books. Less successful books are characterized by a higher percentage of verbs, adverbs, and foreign words. They also rely more on topical words that could be almost cliché ("love"), typical locations, and extreme ("breathless") and negative ("bruised") words.

Dr. Choi and her colleagues in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences—Vikas Ashok, a teaching assistant in the Department of Computer Science, and Song Feng, a fifth year PhD student in the same department—found that the less successful books also rely on verbs that explicitly describe actions and emotions ("wanted", "took", "promised", "cried", "cheered"), while more successful books favor verbs that describe thought-processing ("recognized", "remembered") and verbs that simply serve the purpose of quotes ("say")."

...For practical purposes, the researchers defined "success" by download counts from Project Gutenberg, which houses 42,000 books that are available for free download in electronic format.

The researchers took 1000 sentences from the beginning of each book. They performed systematic analyses based on lexical and syntactic features that have been proven effective in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks such as authorship attribution, genre detection, gender identification, and native language detection."

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"We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe."

- Johann von Goethe

I find myself using adverbs quite a bit in my first drafts. I remove many of them when editing. Good to know that is the right thing to do in order to have a best seller.

"There, you see? It's all about science," proclaimed the cheery carrot.
"Humph," exclaimed the pea, brusquely. "I'm not exactly seeing anything new."
"But it's science!" ejaculated the carrot, his good cheer having been bruised by the pea.

Nothing kills cheer, good or not, faster than brusquely ejaculating past bruises... just one carrot's observation.

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"We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe."

- Johann von Goethe