by Ben Blatt
There are a few takeaways from looking at how thought verbs are applied in different writing. Unlike with exclamation points, there is no real difference between amateur and professional usage of thought verbs. Fan-fiction authors used them at a median rate of 112 per 10,000 words, while New York Times bestsellers used them at 113 and modern award winners used them at 104.
For modern writing, in fact, a clear indicator of thought verb usage is genre. Of the 100 most recent New York Times bestsellers, 13 were romanceII and they came in at an average of 145 per 10,000. Many popular romance novelists come in on the extreme end as well—E L James at 140, Nora Roberts at 143, and Nicholas Sparks averages 168.
As someone who writes with twisted characters and dark humor, there’s no way Palahniuk is a fan of the romance genre. In 2011 he wrote a short story for Playboy called “Romance” in which a man believes he is dating a high-functioning alcoholic but it turns out he is dating a high-functioning woman with a mental disability.
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume is a classic coming-of-age book for young girls in which Margaret deals with her parents and puberty. It’s told in a diary where each entry starts with the same form as its title. Palahniuk’s Damned is a parody of the book with each entry, penned by a thirteen-year-old girl in hell, starting off “Are you there, Satan?” While Blume’s book uses 182 thought verbs per 10,000, Damned uses just 46.
Palahniuk’s disdain for heartwarming stories speaks to the type of stories the Fight Club author is aiming to tell, but not as much about all stories anyone may aspire to write. In this sense, Palahniuk’s advice may only be applicable for a very small niche. For writers aiming to tell stories of protagonists transgressing the norms of society, staying away from direct mention of emotion might be best. For everyone else, spelling out the thoughts and dreams of your characters to the reader is far from the end of the world.
Qualified Advice
In 1920, Cornell professor William Strunk, Jr. published The Elements of Style. It was an obscure guidebook until 39 years later, when Charlotte’s Web author E. B. White updated it with his own advice. Since then it has earned the shorthand name of simply Strunk and White, and is considered by many the standard introduction to the craft of writing.
Much of the advice is familiar if you’ve read any book on writing (including the previous chapters of this book). It warns against emphasizing “simple statements by using a mark of exclamation” and encourages the reader to “write with nouns and verbs, not adjectives and adverbs.” The book also declares it is best to write with force and certainty. In the revised edition White writes: “Consciously or unconsciously, the reader is dissatisfied with being told only what is not; the reader wishes to be told what is. Hence, as a rule, it is better to express even a negative in positive form.”
The examples he gives are of using “dishonest” instead of “not honest” and the sentence “He usually came late” instead of “He was not very often on time.” So let’s look at the word not. How does E. B. White do in living up to his own advice?
He’s up near the top, seventh on our list of fifty authors. (For those wondering if White’s books having low usage here has to do with the fact his novels were children’s books, I don’t think this is the case. I checked other children’s authors, such as Roald Dahl, who did not compare to White.)
The word not is so innocuous and fundamental that it seems hard to imagine a huge difference between practiced writers and unpracticed. In fact, when going through samples of current writing the variation was slim to none. In the modern literary sample it’s used at a rate of 88 per 10,000 words, 100 times in modern bestsellers, and 103 times in fan fiction. Not shows some variation, but the difference is so minor that it’s hard to see not as a great indicator of quality or professionalism for current writing.
But other advice that Strunk and White touches on does rely on discrete, extraneous words. The book is full of recommendations to build a simple, straightforward writing style. One of the key items, added by White to the 1959 edition, advises writers: “Avoid the use of qualifiers.” White picks out several words in particular: “Rather, very, little, pretty—these are the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words.”
Now, one of White’s three books is Stuart Little, so out of fairness we’ll strip little from the count. Looking at just rather, very, and pretty, what White describes as leeches on prose, how does the Charlotte’s Web author measure up?
Unlike the other tips I showed earlier, White does not follow his own advice when compared to others. And though there is variation from one author to another, these differences are not apparent in any large quantity across different types of modern writing. Modern award winners come in at 108 per 100,000 words, 118 for bestsellers, and 103 for fan fiction.
This all looks like a loss for White: He used the qualifiers at a high rate of 220 per 100,000 and the pros use qualifiers just as often as the amateurs.
But what if, in the big picture, White has won? What if his advice is being followed by all writers and all speakers?
The edition of The Elements of Style in which White elaborated on the use of qualifiers came out in 1959. In the 1960s the median bestseller used 152 per 100,000. Qualifier use had declined more than 20 % by 2010’s bestsellers.
If we expand the time frame the difference is clearer and more extreme. Using the subset of twentieth-century classics (as described in more detail in Chapter 2), we can see that use has declined throughout the past century. Classics of the earliest part of the twentieth century, like Heart of Darkness and My Ántonia, had double the qualifier usage of newer classics like Beloved and Possession.
And if we extend even further back the trend continues. I looked at all top downloads from Project Gutenberg’s ebook collection. These are classic books such as Pride and Prejudice, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Importance of Being Earnest. Of the books written between 1850 and 1899 the median qualifier usage was 260, and between 1800 and 1849 qualifier usage measures in at 297. That’s almost three times as much as what you could expect to find in any literary or popular book today; the current average is just over 100.
In the long game, E. B. White has won, even if he wasn’t the paragon of the movement. Qualifier use has been declining for centuries. Much of the decline has to do with the decline of the word very which accounts for about 75 % of the three qualifiers White singled out.
Jane Austen is one of the English language’s most celebrated authors but her use of words like very is off the charts. Her celebrated book Emma has a rate of 843 qualifiers per 100,000 words. Consider this excerpt:
She was very fond of singing. He could sing a little himself. She believed he was very clever, and understood every thing. He had a very fine flock, and, while she was with them, he had been bid more for his wool than any body in the country. She believed every body spoke well of him. His mother and sisters were very fond of him.
In Austen’s writing very is common, peppered throughout sentences without caution. Today, such an extreme rate is jarring. But part of that has to do with the era. In the early 1800s her use was high, but not atypical.
There’s no way to say how much this has to do with people editing out unneeded words, as Strunk and White advise, and how much has to do with a longer-term change in the way people talk. I think at least part of it, though, does have to do with people being more attentive to the granular elements of their writing. Coming up through an average American public school, I remember being told to delete the verys from my papers even when more nuanced writing tips were nowhere to be found. The tip even made its way into Dead Poets Society (the book was inspired by the movie, not the other way around), with a rationale that sounds very similar to the argument for avoiding adverbs (well, at least the first part does . . .).
So avoid using the word “very” because it’s lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don’t use very sad, use morose. Language wa
s invented for one reason, boys—to woo women—and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do. It also won’t do in your essays.
The irony, of course, is that given the decline of very, the students in the Dead Poets Society would have been more likely to read the word very in the works of the deceased writers they admired than anything they were already writing.III
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Throughout this chapter, I’ve dug through a handful of writing tips from acclaimed authors. Writers are generally good at following through with their own advice. But the tricky part for us is that they often give advice on matters that contrast with the style of other successful writers. Are these writing tips universal means to improvement? Or are they nothing more than a novelist’s pet peeves? In some cases the evidence is clearer than others. I would trim the use of exclamation marks and the word very based on the data alone, even if the advice had never been dispensed.
In other cases, the data shows that writers advise things they are doing on a unique level. These are fascinating habits to consider, but not necessarily details that everyone should incorporate into their own writing. Here, the more important lesson may lie in the pure attention to detail that these rules inspire. It may not be the avoidance of thought verbs that makes Palahniuk a great writer, but rather the fact that he’s scrutinizing the effects of even such seemingly straightforward words in his work. It’s by noting the role of each word and punctuation mark that the greats are able to hone their writing. Ultimately, this may be what gives the words that remain on the page—in a classic or a bestseller—their power to move us.
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I. This sample was created by sampling the most recent books to win the literary awards described in Chapter 2.
II. I used Goodreads genre tags for classifying the books. I counted books categorized as “romance” but did not count genre-spanning books, such as “fantasy-romance.”
III. Google Books Ngrams also shows a decline in the word very over time. From 1900 to 2000 it dropped about 60 %. However, Google Books includes books such as Very Long Baseline Interferometer and My Very First Mother Goose and there is no standardization of genre over time. Therefore, Google Books Ngrams alone may not be representative of usage of words in popular and literary fiction.
One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.
—JACK KEROUAC, THE DHARMA BUMS
If you have ever read a Dr. Seuss book, you may be familiar with words like fizza-ma-wizza-ma-dill, fiffer-feffer-feff, and truffula.
You may also be familiar with these: a, will, the.
Besides made-up words and rhymes, Dr. Seuss’s biggest trademark is the simplicity of his writing. Even compared to other children’s authors, Dr. Seuss pushed the limits. We can partly thank his Houghton Mifflin editor, William Spaulding, who after a string of successes presented Seuss with a list of just a few hundred simple words in the mid-1950s. Seuss had already published Horton Hears a Who!, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, and If I Ran the Zoo. But, as detailed in the New Yorker article “Cat People,” Spaulding wanted Seuss to go after an even younger audience: “Write me a story that first graders can’t put down!”
Seuss would later describe how he struggled with Spaulding’s challenge:
He sent me a list of about three hundred words and told me to make a book out of them. At first I thought it was impossible and ridiculous, and I was about to get out of the whole thing; then decided to look at the list one more time and to use the first two words that rhymed as the title of the book—cat and hat were the ones my eyes lighted on. I worked on the book for nine months—throwing it across the room and letting it hang for a while—but I finally got it done.
The result was The Cat in the Hat. It clocks in at 220 unique words, and to this day ranks as the second-most-selling book of Seuss’s career. The one book ahead of it? It’s Green Eggs and Ham, which uses just fifty words. All but one, anywhere, are one syllable.
Seuss’s two most popular books are those in which he restricted himself the most: Simplicity brought success.
Of course, Seuss was not writing for a general audience—he was writing for children still learning to read. It would be impossible to write a book with just fifty words if it weren’t covered in giant illustrations. And adult readers are looking for more than your average first-grader.
But what if there’s more to this idea? Sure, the books we read and love as adults are more complex—but just how complex? Is there an ideal level if you’re aiming to write the next number one bestseller? And where do the literary greats clock in?
The word lists that Dr. Seuss used when writing The Cat and the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham were created by a man named Rudolf Flesch. In his 1955 book Why Johnny Can’t Read, Flesch argued that reading education in America was in dire need of reform; he introduced the nation to phonics and his word lists ended up inspiring just the kind of revolution he was hoping for.
Flesch then went on to create a mathematical formula—the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level test—that was capable of measuring the simplicity or complexity of any text. The formula itself is simple—just a couple of fractions weighted and then added together.
The score, by Flesch’s description, is the grade level required to understand the text. If a book is given a grade of 3, that means a third grader (and anyone older) could be expected to understand it.
The test works best when applied to large texts but it’s easy to understand with short samples. Take the first sentence in George Washington’s first State of the Union Address:
I embrace with great satisfaction the opportunity which now presents itself of congratulating you on the present favorable prospects of our public affairs.
At 43 syllables and 23 words, the sentence would be given a grade-level score of 15.
Compare to the first sentence in George W. Bush’s last State of the Union Address:
Seven years have passed since I first stood before you at this rostrum.
It has 16 syllables, 13 words, and a grade-level score of 4.
The numbers 4 and 15 may seem arbitrary, but side by side it’s easy to see why the first sentence is given the higher complexity score. The grade scores tend to average out over the course of a longer text, but short samples like these do show the limits of a metric like Flesch-Kincaid. It has its detractors, who criticize the formula for being too simple or not capturing context or fumbling the exact grade levels.
For instance, there are some unusual writers whose unique style breaks the simple scoring system. Green Eggs and Ham has a negative grade-level score, -1.3 to be exact. Consider the passage below:
Not in a box.
Not with a fox.
Not in a house.
Not with a mouse.
I would not eat them here or there.
It has 24 words and 24 syllables spread out over 5 sentences, which yields a negative score.
On the other end of the spectrum is William Faulkner. In The Sound and the Fury he disregards punctuation, which leaves him with a “sentence” composed of over 1,400 words. It has a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score of 551.
But these are the outliers, the texts that pose the biggest challenge. As a relative measure, Flesch-Kincaid works well, averaging out the irregular sentences over the length of a full book. Even The Sound and the Fury as a whole has a grade-level score of 20. Most books meant for a general audience, not by Faulkner and not by Seuss, will fall within the fourth to eleventh grade. Every New York Times number one bestseller since 1960 falls in this seven-grade-level spread.I Ultimately, Flesch-Kincaid’s simplicity is an advantage, allowing us to compare huge swathes of text across genres or generations.
If you follow U.S. politics you might see the Flesch-Kincaid formula pop up once a year when it’s time for the State of the Union. It has become a popular pastime to evaluate the complexity of these speeches, for doing so reveals an undeniable trend. When comparing all of the State of the Union addresses from America’s foun
ding to the present, the Flesch-Kincaid test shows a steady decline in the sophistication of our political speech.
If you’re being optimistic, politics is reaching a wider audience. If you’re being cynical, politics is getting stupider by the decade.
In an article in the Guardian, titled perfectly “The state of our union is . . . dumber,” the authors used Flesch-Kincaid to determine that the annual presidential State of the Union Address has gone from an eighteenth-grade level pre-1900, to a twelfth grade level in the 1900s, and it’s now sunk below a tenth-grade level in the 2000s.
The role of the State of the Union has changed over the years. After all, when Washington was addressing Congress in 1790 it was meant as an actual addressII to Congress. The event has transformed into a national radio and television spectacle, making it important to reach every corner of America, regardless of age and education.
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It might be one thing for the State of the Union to drift downward, but what about the world of books? Do we see any patterns when we look at the state of the American novel over time? Is the state of our fiction . . . dumber?
To find out, I collected every digitized number one New York Times bestseller since 1960III and ran the Flesch-Kincaid test on all 563 of them.IV
The overall trend, in just the last fifty-plus years, shows the same downward slope. The bestseller list is full of much simpler fiction. If you pick books by checking out what is trending on the list, chances are you are going to be picking up books of less sophistication today than you would forty or fifty years ago.