** Geek alert **
Amazon has text stats that measure ‘average words per sentence‘ and ‘% complex words.” Non-fiction author Steven Johnson graphs his books’ text stats against those of Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point, Blink), Steven Pinker (How The Mind Works, The Stuff of Thought), Seth Godin (The Dip, Small is the New Big), Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Why Orwell Matters), and ‘post-structuralist legends’ Michel Foucault (Madness and Civilization, The History of Sexuality) and Frederic Jameson (Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism).
Among his findings:
“Gladwell’s sentences are fully 25% shorter than mine. I’m not sure if the average reader would notice the difference …, but a 25% drop in sentence length has to alter the reading experience dramatically. Clearly, the only things separating me from selling ten million copies of my books are those extra 6.5 words per sentence.”
Johnson’s latest book, btw, is The Ghost Map, ‘the story of a terrifying outbreak of cholera in 1854 London that ended up changing the world. An idea book wrapped around a page-turner.’