Writing by the numbers: one researcher’s quantitative, computational journey to understanding great writing. From the interview with data journalist Ben Blatt:

My background is in mathematics and computer science, but I’ve always loved reading and writing. As I was writing more and more, I became very interested in how different writers and people give writing advice. There’s a lot of it that made sense but seemed not backed up by information, and a lot of it that conflicted with each other….

In fact, there is a trend that authors like Hemingway, Morrison and Steinbeck, their best books, the ones that are held up and have the most attention on them now, are the books with the fewest amount of –ly adverbs. Also, if you compare amateur fiction writing and online writing that’s unedited with bestsellers and Pulitzer Prize winners of recent times, there is a discrepancy, where less –ly adverbs are used by the published authors….

I went through the 50 authors that I looked at, as well as large samples of fan fiction, and found, not by a crazy margin but a meaningful margin, that Americans do have a higher ratio of the loud words to the quiet words. There are a few explanations. It could be that that is how Americans talk throughout all of their lives, so that is the way that writers describe them talking frequently. You could also just see it as American writers having a preference for more action-based, thriller, high tempo stories compared to the more subtle ones. Americans are indeed louder by the numbers.

h/t @PhiBetaKappa