mauve

[John Bailey]

Haven't read it but have read a bunch of stories about it. The author
probably knew that a book applying data journalism to literature would get
lots of press. The "somewhat arbitrarily" chosen list of 50 authors is a
shortcoming, and it would be much more interesting if he'd sorted 500+
writers, since data journalism with a sample size of 50 is kind of not
really data journalism.
But the conclusions he comes to aren't as offensive as I expected and you
can take them or leave them as you see fit. The observation that 45 percent
of Danielle Steele's first sentences involve the weather - that's fun. And
James Patterson's astonishing use of cliche - I know for a fact that
Patterson just plots his books and farms the actual writing out to
ghostwriters, so that's no surprise.

On Tue, Mar 21, 2017 at 8:29 PM, Jochen Stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com>
wrote:

> http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/one-writer-used-s
> tatistics-reveal-secrets-what-makes-great-writing-180962515/
>
> Has anybody of you read this book?
>
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