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WORK TITLE: Nabokov’s Favorite Word Is Mauve
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https://bblatt.com/about/ * http://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Ben-Blatt/487474663
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HEADING: Blatt, Ben
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670 __ |a Blatt, Ben. I don’t care if we never get back, c2014: |b title page (Ben Blatt) book jacket (Ben Blatt is a staff writer at Slate and a recent Harvard graduate whose sports analytics studies have been picked up by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Deadspin, and others.)
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EDUCATION:Harvard College, Harvard University (graduated).
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Writer, journalist, consultant, and statistician. Slate, former staff writer; Harvard Lampoon, former staff writer. Analytics consultant for sports teams, including the Jacksonville Jaguars.
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Contributor to books, including The Best of the Harvard Lampoon.
Contributor to newspapers and magazines, including the Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Harvard Lampoon, and Deadspin.
SIDELIGHTS
Writer and statistician Ben Blatt is a data journalist who uses statistics and big data as the basis for much of his writing. He applies mathematical and statistical techniques to the data behind the stories he writes, discovering insights that would be impossible to gain without the clarity provided by numbers. As a staff writer for Slate, he used these techniques to “cover pop-culture topics ranging from Wheel of Fortune to Seinfeld to fantasy football,” commented a writer on the Ben Blatt Website. In addition to his work for Slate, Blatt has also contributed to periodicals such as the Wall Street Journal and the Boston Globe. He is a former writer for the Harvard Lampoon, a popular humor magazine. Blatt holds a degree in applied mathematics from Harvard College.
I Don't Care If We Never Get Back
Blatt’s first long-form exploration of data journalism is I Don’t Care If We Never Get Back: Thirty Games in Thirty Days on the Best Worst Baseball Road Trip Ever. In this book, Blatt and his friend and professional colleague Eric Brewster undertake a large-scale trip across the country. Their goal is to “go on the mathematically optimal baseball road trip,” noted a writer on the Simon & Schuster Website, as determined by a data-crunching algorithm that Blatt developed. This trip was envisioned to allow the duo to travel more than 20,000 miles, without using any air travel, to see baseball games in all thirty Major League ballparks in thirty days. Blatt and Brewster share the writing duties, offering their differing perspectives as the adventure progresses. These perspectives provide an ongoing counterpoint: Blatt loves baseball, Brewster does not.
As Blatt and Brewster get farther along in their trip, they realize that a mathematically perfect travel itinerary does not account for the unexpected or the types of variables that can affect a ground-based journey. Heavy traffic, weather, mechanical issues, and human error on the part of the travelers threaten to derail the trip and prevent them from achieving their goal. Other factors also intrude: scalpers, sold-out games, and even a hastily acquired date for Brewster add additional flavor to their journey. “The result, like any good road trip tale, is less about the destination and more about the bonds formed and experiences had trying to get there,” observed a Publishers Weekly writer. Booklist contributor Alan Moores called the book a “quirky book that just might draw a crowd.”
Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve
Blatt’s second book, Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal about the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing, takes a whimsical look at the writing styles and quirks of several well-known authors, both producers of classic literature and writers of commercial-grade genre fiction. Blatt’s conclusions are, again, based on a wide-ranging mathematical and statistical analysis of the written works under consideration, aided by being able to feed multiple electronic versions of books into his customized algorithm. What Blatt looks for, and finds in abundance, is evidence of what professional writers have produced over decades: how they write, how they choose their words, and what effect their work has on readers and formative generations of writers.
For example, as indicated by the title, Blatt analyzes the most-used words of several writers, including Nabokov. He finds the words that occur time and again in the writing of luminaries such as Jane Austen, John Cheever, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and more popular and genre writers such as Dan Brown and Agatha Christie. He finds evidence to back up the long-standing claim that men and women write differently. He discovers that some writers do not always follow the best advice, such as avoiding adverbs and clichés—in some cases, writers do not even follow their own advice. He proves that writers can be identified by their prose style and that more concise and direct writing has the best chance of making a lasting impression and remaining popular with readers over a longer period. Blatt “drags you into the weeds with him, but he’s a personable writer, and he’s brought along a picnic lunch, so you don’t mind the bugs,” commented Glen Weldon on the National Public Radio Website. A Kirkus Reviews contributor called the book “Illuminating entertainment for literary readers.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 15, 2014, Alan Moores, review of I Don’t Care If We Never Get Back: Thirty Games in Thirty Days on the Best Worst Baseball Road Trip Ever, p. 11.
Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2014, review of I Don’t Care If We Never Get Back; January 15, 2017, review of Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal about the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing.
New York Times Book Review, March 9, 2017, John Williams, “Reading by Numbers,” review of Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve.
Publishers Weekly, March 3, 2014, review of I Don’t Care If We Never Get Back, p. 57.
Smithsonian, March 14, 2017, Megan Gambino, “One Writer Used Statistics to Reveal the Secrets of What Makes Great Writing,” interview with Ben Blatt.
ONLINE
Ben Blatt Website, http://www.bblatt.com (November 3, 2017).
National Public Radio Website, http://www.npr.org/ (March 31, 2017), Morning Edition, Glen Weldon, “Purple Prose: The New Book Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve Subjects Thousands of Books to Statistical Analysis,” transcript of radio interview with Ben Blatt.
Run Spot Run, http://www.runspotrun.com/ (May 21, 2017), Jeff Alford, review of Nabokov’s Favorite Word Is Mauve.
Simon & Schuster Website, http://www.simonandschuster.com/ (November 3, 2017), biography of Ben Blatt.*
Ben Blatt
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EPSON scanner imageBen Blatt is an author and statistician. His first book, co-written with Eric Brewster, is I Don’t Care if We Never Get Back, which follows the duo’s quest to go on the mathematically optimal baseball road trip, traveling 20,000 miles to a game in all thirty ballparks in thirty days without planes.
Blatt’s second book, Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve, is a playful and informative look at what the numbers have to say about our favorite authors and their classic books. Do men and women write differently? Are bestsellers getting dumber over time? Which writer uses the most clichés? What makes a great opening sentence? How can we judge a book by its cover? Using a database of thousands of books, the book attempts (with humor) to answer these questions of art with data.
He is a former staff writer for Slate magazine. His work used data to cover pop-culture topics ranging from Wheel of Fortune to Seinfeld to fantasy football. Blatt’s work has been featured The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Deadspin, and NPR.
Blatt is a former member of The Harvard Lampoon humor magazine. A selection of his work from the magazine is feature in The Best of the Harvard Lampoon.
In college Blatt was a member of The Harvard Sports Analysis Collective and blogged on their club website regularly. He has consulted for the analytics department of the Jacksonville Jaguars.
Blatt is equally proud of everything he has ever written, except this very bland and self-promoting ABOUT section which is mostly devoid of any humor, but at the same time a necessary evil.
Ben Blatt is a graduate of Harvard College with a degree in Applied Mathematics.
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Ben Blatt
Ben Blatt is a former staff writer for Slate and The Harvard Lampoon who has taken his fun approach to data journalism to topics such as Seinfeld, mapmaking, The Beatles, and Jeopardy! He is the author of Nabokov’s Favorite Word Is Mauve and, with Eric Brewster, the coauthor of I Don’t Care if We Never Get Back, which follows the duo’s quest to go on the mathematically optimal baseball road trip, traveling 20,000 miles to a game in all thirty ballparks in thirty days without planes. Blatt’s work has also been published in The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, and Deadspin.
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'Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve' Crunches The (Literary) Numbers
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March 31, 20175:07 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition
GLEN WELDON
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Purple, Prose: The new book Nabokov's Favorite Word is Mauve subjects thousands of books to statistical analysis.
NPR Multimedia/AP Photo
Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve
Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve
What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing
by Ben Blatt
Hardcover, 271 pages purchase
Let's acknowledge this at the top: It's a thin slice.
To gaze across the great swath of written English over the past few centuries — that teeming, jostling, elbow-throwing riot of characters and places and stories and ideas — only to isolate, with dispassionate precision, some stray, infinitesimal data point such as which author uses cliches like "missing the forest for the trees" the most, would be like ...
Well. You get it. More like missing the forest for the raspberry seed stuck to the underside of the 395th leaf on the 139th branch of the 223,825th tree.
But that's what statistician Ben Blatt's new book, Nabokov's Favorite Word is Mauve, sets out to do, thin slice by thin slice.
He loaded thousands of books — classics and contemporary best-sellers — into various databases and let his hard drive churn through them, seeking to determine, for example, if our favorite authors follow conventional writing advice about using cliches, adverbs and exclamation points (they mostly do); if men and women write differently (yep); if an algorithm can identify a writer from his or her prose style (it can); and which authors use the shortest first sentences (Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Mark Twain) versus those who use the longest (Salman Rushdie, Michael Chabon, Edith Wharton).
I can hear thousands of monocles dropping into thousands of cups of Earl Grey from here. "But what of literature?" you sputter. "What does any of that technical folderol have to do," — here you start wiping your monocle on your nosegay — "with ART?"
Not much, is the answer. Blatt's book isn't terribly interested in the art of writing. What it's fascinated by — and is fascinating about — is the craft of writing.
Technique. Word choice. Sentence structure. Reading level. There's something cheeky in the way Blatt throws genre best-sellers into his statistical blender alongside literary lions and hits puree, looking for patterns of style shared by, say, James Joyce and James Patterson.
A Balm For Bookish Know-it-Alls
Enlarge this image
Author Ben Blatt is a journalist and statistician.
Sierra Katow/Simon & Schuster
To say that you likely won't find much that's truly surprising in Nabokov's Favorite Word is Mauve isn't a critique. In fact, it's kind of the point. Reading it, you experience the feeling, again and again, of having some vague, squishy notion you've always sort of held about a given author getting ruthlessly distilled into a stark, cold, numerical fact.
Which is, if you're the kind of person who likes to get proven right (hi!), a hell of a lot of fun.
Now: It's a book of statistics, and statistics rest on distinct sets of assumptions that must get made before any number can start getting well and truly crunched. So if you're curious about Blatt's methodology, boy are you in luck. Every chapter begins with Blatt chattily sharing with the reader — as chattily as a book this eager to walk us through the formula used to calculate Flesch-Kincaide Grade Levels can be — every aspect of his thinking. How he defines "Great Books." What constitutes a long sentence. Which chapter-endings qualify as cliffhangers, and which merely ... abrupt.
He drags you into the weeds with him, but he's a personable writer, and he's brought along a picnic lunch, so you don't mind the bugs.
Herewith, some of my favorite of Blatt's findings in Nabokov's Favorite Word is Mauve:
MEN WRITE LIKE THIS, BUT WOMEN WRITE LIKE THIS
Enlarge this image
Maidens, Interrupted: A chart of word use in classic literature, from Nabokov's Favorite Word is Mauve.
Simon & Schuster
It tuns out that — sit down for this next bit — authors who are women write equally about men and women, but men write overwhelmingly about men.
I know. I'm shaken, over here.
For every appearance of the word "she" in classics by male authors, Blatt found three uses of the word "he." In classics by women, the ratio was pretty much one-to-one.
Also: Male authors of classic literature are three times as likely to write that a female character "interrupted" than male characters. In contemporary popular and literary fiction, the ratio is smaller, but it's still there.
FAVORITE WORDS
Blatt looked for the specific words that authors use much more frequently than the rate at which those words generally occur in the rest of written English (i.e., compared to a huge sample of literary works — some 385 million words in total — written in English between 1810 and 2009, assembled by linguists at Brigham Young Univeristy).
His criteria: A favorite word -
Must occur in at least half of the author's books
Must be used at a rate of at least once per 100,000 words
Must not be so obscure that it's used less than once per million in the BYU sample of written English
Is not a proper noun
Here's some that jumped out at me.
Jane Austen: civility, fancying, imprudence (Story checks out, right?)
Dan Brown: grail, masonic, pyramid (I am sagely nodding, over here.)
Truman Capote: clutter, zoo, geranium
John Cheever: infirmary, venereal, erotic (Boy howdy, that's a whole Cheever short story, right there.)
Agatha Christie: inquest, alibi, frightful
F. Scott Fitzgerald: facetious, muddled, sanitarium
Ian Fleming: lavatory, trouser, spangled ("Pardon me, Blofeld; must dash to the lavatory, got something spangled on me trouser.")
Ernest Hemingway: concierge, astern, cognac (Yuuup.)
Toni Morrison: messed, navel, slop
'Lolita' And Lollipops: What Nabokov Had To Say About Nosh
THE SALT
'Lolita' And Lollipops: What Nabokov Had To Say About Nosh
Vladimir Nabokov: mauve, banal, pun (As Blatt points out, Nabokov had synesthesia, a condition that caused him to associate various colors with the sound and shape of letters and words. "Mauve" was his favorite: He used the word at a rate that's 44 times higher than the rate at which it occurs in the BYU sample of written English.)
Jodi Picoult: courtroom, diaper, diner
Ayn Rand: transcontinental, comrade, proletarian
J.K. Rowling: wand, wizard, potion (Well, duh.)
Amy Tan: gourd, peanut, noodles
Mark Twain: hearted, shucks, satan
Edith Wharton: nearness, daresay, compunction (Man I love me some Edith Friggin' Wharton.)
Virginia Woolf: flushing, blotting, mantelpiece (Chandler Bing: "Could they BE more Virginia Woolf?")
ADVERBS
You know: nearly, suddenly, sloppily, etc. Writing teachers tell you to avoid them, that they sap the energy from a sentence. Strong, clear writing is fueled by verbs and nouns, they say, not by adjectives and adverbs.
Turns out, the adverb thing holds up: When Blatt combined several lists of the "Great Books" of the 20th century, he came up with 37 which were generally considered great.
When comparing these to the same authors' other novels, the "Great Books" used significantly fewer adverbs. Of these authors' books that kept to a strict adverb rate (less than 50 per 10,000 words) 67% were considered "Great," whereas only 16% of their adverb-loaded books (containing more than 150 per 10,000 words) were ever considered "Great."
EXCLAMATION POINTS
Well I mean: I hate 'em, at least. My husband uses them like they're powdered sugar and his emails are lemon bars. But I hate 'em.
You know who doesn't hate 'em? Besides my husband, I mean? James Joyce. Dude loved them.
Blatt took a sample of 50 authors of classics and contemporary best-sellers, totaling 580 books. The authors who used the most exclamation points per 100,000 words were:
5. J.R.R. Tolkien (767)
4. E.B. White (782. Gasp; nobody tell Mr. Strunk.)
3. Sinclair Lewis (844. I guess it CAN happen here.)
2. Tom Wolfe (929)
1. James Joyce (1,105)
Elmore Leonard — bless him — used the fewest: Just 49 per 100,000 words.
IT'S RAINING CATS AND DOGS AND CLICHES
A Lively Mind: Your Brain On Jane Austen
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A Lively Mind: Your Brain On Jane Austen
When it comes to use of cliches, there's another gender split.
In Blatt's list of 50 classic and best-selling authors (scroll down to the bottom of this post to see them all), those who use cliches most frequently? All men.
5. Chuck Palahniuk (129 per 100,000 words)
4. Salman Rushdie (131)
3. Kurt Vonnegut (140. All those "And so it goes"es in Slaughterhouse-Five really hurt him here, I bet.)
2. Tom Wolfe (143)
1. James Patterson (160)
(In fairness to Patterson, Blatt includes cliches found in dialogue, and Patterson's characters aren't exactly going around coining new phrases with a Joycean fervor.)
The authors who used the fewest cliches? All women.
5. Veronica Roth (69)
4. Willa Cather (67)
3. Virginia Woolf (62)
2. Edith Wharton (62)
1. Jane Austen (A paltry 45 per 100,000 words, about 1/3 of the rate at which James "More Cliches Than You Can Shake A Stick At" Patterson busts them out.)
Now, again: It's a thin slice, looking at literature in this knowingly reductive way. It doesn't tell you everything, and of course it doesn't give you a true sense of the feeling you get when you read these authors for yourself.
But what it often succeeds in capturing, with astonishing clarity, is your feeling about these authors.
Case in point: The author who is most likely to mention the weather in the opening sentence?
Danielle Steele.
She does it in — precisely — 46 percent of her books.
A ranking of authors by cliche-use, from Nabokov's Favorite Word is Mauve.
Simon & Schuster
Correction
March 31, 2017
An earlier version of this post slightly misstated Blatt's finding about adverbs, by concluding "Of [the 37 books generally considered 'Great'], 2 out of 3 — 67 percent — contained a significantly lower number of adverbs (less than 50 per 10,000 words) than occurs, on average, in written English."
The 67 percent figure instead refers to the portion of books by "great authors" that are considered great, and that meet criteria for low-adverb rate stated in the corrected text.
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One Writer Used Statistics to Reveal the Secrets of What Makes Great Writing
In his new book, data journalist Ben Blatt takes a by-the-numbers look at literary classics and finds some fascinating patterns
image: https://thumbs-prod.si-cdn.com/vWxGS5IPKXlIYC00ix6VP4tWdHw=/800x600/filters:no_upscale()/https://public-media.smithsonianmag.com/filer/18/f5/18f57e77-7d71-4a26-8ac5-9570d61de258/reading.jpg
reading.jpg
(kurmyshov/iStock)
By Megan Gambino
SMITHSONIAN.COM
MARCH 14, 2017
4.2K17354686.4K
In most college-level literature courses, you find students dissecting small portions of literary classics: Shakespeare’s soliloquies, Joyce’s stream of consciousness and Hemingway’s staccato sentences. No doubt, there is so much that can be learned about a writer, his or her craft and a story’s meaning by this type of close reading.
Advertisement (1 of 1): 0:13
image: http://static.mediabong.com/close.png
But Ben Blatt makes a strong argument for another approach. By focusing on certain sentences and paragraphs, he posits in his new book, Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve, readers are neglecting all of the other words, which, in an average-length novel amount to tens of thousands of data points.
The journalist and statistician created a database of the text from a smattering of 20th century classics and bestsellers to quantitatively answer a number of questions of interest. His analysis revealed some quirky patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed:
By the numbers, the best opening sentences to novels do tend to be short. Prolific author James Patterson averages 160 clichés per 100,000 words (that’s 115 more than the revered Jane Austen), and Vladimir Nabokov used the word mauve 44 times more often than the average writer in the past two centuries.
Smithsonian.com talked with Blatt about his method, some of his key findings and why big data is important to the study of literature.
You’ve taken a statistical approach to studying everything from Where’s Waldo to Seinfeld, fast food joints to pop songs. Can you explain your method, and why you do what you do?
I am a data journalist, and I look at things in pop culture and art. I really like looking at things quantitatively and unbiased that have a lot of information that people haven’t gone through. If you wanted to learn about what the typical person from the United States is like, it would be useful, but you wouldn’t just talk to one person, know everything about them and then assume that everything about people in the United States is the same. I think one thing with writing that kind of gets lost is that you can focus on one sentence by an author, especially in creative writing classes, or one passage, and you lose the bigger picture to see these general patterns and trends that writers are using over and over again, hundreds and maybe thousands of times in their own writing.
image: https://thumbs-prod.si-cdn.com/9e2deIhSOSTSakiJXoUObGqLcFU=/fit-in/300x0/https://public-media.smithsonianmag.com/embedly/embedly_image_e052e11fc96d33fb3fd0897716e534735fb531ac.jpg
Preview thumbnail for video 'Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing
Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing
BUY
So what made you turn to literature?
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. I just thought there had to be a way to take these topics in writing that people were already well aware of and talking about and test them on great authors and popular authors to see if this advice is real or if it is prescriptive advice that doesn’t really mean anything in the real books and the real pages.
What was the first question you wanted to ask about literary classics and bestsellers?
The first chapter in the book is on the advice of whether or not you should use –ly adverbs. This is also the first chapter I wrote chronologically. It’s mostly on Stephen King’s advice not to use –ly adverbs in his book On Writing, which for a lot of writers is the book on writing. But lots of other writers—Toni Morrison, Chuck Palahniuk—and any creative writing class advises not to use an –ly adverb because it is an unnecessary word and a sign that you are not being concise. Instead of saying, “He quickly ran,” you can say, “He sprinted.”
So I wanted to know, is this actually true? If this is such good advice, you’d expect that the great authors actually do use it less. You’d expect that amateur writers are using it more than published authors. I just really wanted to know, stylistically, first if Stephen King followed his own advice, and then if it applies to all the other great and revered authors.
So, what did you find?
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 am not so one-sided that I think you can just take out the –ly adverbs from an okay book and it becomes a great book. That’s obviously not how it works. But there is something to the fact that writers who are writing in a very direct manner do produce books that overall live the longest.
image: https://public-media.smithsonianmag.com/filer/79/d3/79d38605-2033-47cb-9376-5ee85a5867c9/p13_-_adverbs.jpg
p13 - Adverbs.JPG
How did you go about creating a database of literary works?
For many of the questions, I was using the same 50 authors I had chosen somewhat arbitrarily. Essentially it was based on authors that were on the top of the bestseller list, authors that were on top of the greatest authors of all time list and authors that just kind of represented a range of different genres and times and readers. That way, throughout the book, you can compare these authors and get to know them.
It was very important to me that if I said something like, “Toni Morrison uses this word at this rate,” I was talking about every single novel she’s ever written and not just the three that I happen to already have. In my book, there are 50 to 100 authors that are referred to throughout. I found their bibliographies and then found all their novels that they had written up to that point as their complete record. In some ways, it is a bit like keeping sports statistics, where each book is kind of like a season and then all of these seasons or books come together as a career. You can see how authors change over time and how they do things overall. Once you have all the books on file, then answering these questions that in some ways are very daunting is very straightforward.
And how did you process all that text?
There is a programming language called Python, and within that, there is a set of tools called the Natural Language Toolkit, often abbreviated NLTK. The tools involved in that are freely available to anyone. You can download the package online and use it in Python or other languages. You can’t get many of the writing questions in particular, but you can say, how many times does this word appear in the text? It can go through and identify where sentences end and where sentences begin, and parts of speech—adjective vs. adverb vs. verb. So once you have those tools, you can get the data.
What stats did you compile manually? What was the most tedious?
There is one section where I look at opening sentences. Elmore Leonard, who was a very successful novelist, had said, “Never open a book with weather.” This is also advice found in a lot of writing guides. So I went through hundreds of authors to see how often they open their book on weather. For example, Danielle Steel, I believe 45 percent of her first sentences in books are about the weather. Many times it’s just “It was a magnificent day,” or “It was bright and sunny out,” things like that. For that, there was no way to do that automatically without having some error, so I would just go through all the book files and mark whether there was weather involved. You can say it was tedious, because it was a lot of data collected, but it was kind of fun to go through and read hundreds of opening sentences at once. There are other patterns that clearly emerge from authors over time.
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p207---Weather.jpg
Like you say, tedious for some, fun for others. Some might think this analytical approach is boring, but you argue that it can be “amusing” and “often downright funny.” What was your funniest finding?
The title of the book, Nabokov’s Favorite Word Is Mauve, is about how, by the numbers, the word that he uses at the highest rate compared to English is mauve. That ends up making a lot of sense if you look at his background, because he had synesthesia. He talked, in his autobiography, about how when he heard different letters and sounds, his brain would automatically conjure colors.
I repeated that experiment on 100 other authors to see what their favorite word is. As a result, you get three words that are representative of their writing by the words they use most. Civility, fancying and imprudence. That’s Jane Austen. I think if you saw those words, Jane Austen might be one of your first guesses. And then you have an author like John Updike, who is a bit more gritty and real and of a different time. His favorite words are rimmed, prick and fucked. I think seeing the personality come through based on these simple mathematical questions is very interesting. If you have a favorite author, going through it does sort of reveal something about their personality you may not have noticed before.
Ray Bradbury had written that his favorite word was cinnamon. By the numbers, he does use that a lot. His explanation of why he liked cinnamon was that it reminded him of his grandmother’s pantry. So I went through and found other spice words and smell words that could be associated with a grandmother’s pantry, and Ray Bradbury does use most of those words at a very high rate. In some sense, you can get this weird, Freudian look into something about authors’ childhoods. If Ray Bradbury hadn’t said that, maybe you could still figure it out.
You compared American and British writers, confirming a stereotype that Americans are loud. Can you explain this one?
This one was actually based originally on a study done by a graduate student at Stanford. He had identified words that are used to describe dialogue in books, and described them as loud, neutral or quiet. “Whispered” and “murmured” would be under quiet. Neutral would be “he said” or “she said,” and loud would be “he exclaimed” or “shouted.” 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.
image: https://public-media.smithsonianmag.com/filer/69/84/6984b259-0e9d-47d6-8ef0-b8dde9e1d4a4/blatt_author_photo_credit_sierra_katow.jpg
Blatt_author photo_Credit Sierra Katow.JPG
Ben Blatt, author of Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve(Sierra Katow)
Why do you think applying math to writing is a good way to study literature?
I am definitely not advocating that this should be the first way you study literature if you are trying to improve your writing. But even a novel of moderate length is probably 50,000 words, and that’s 50,000 data points. You’re just not going to be able to soak that all in at once, and there are going to be some questions that you just can’t answer reading through on your own. It’s good to see the bigger picture. If you sit down and study one paragraph, you’re in your creative writing class talking to your professor, if there is a set way to look at that, you are just going to see that throughout everything. But with the data, that kind of frees you of it, and you can answer some questions without these biases and really get some new information.
You mention that you kept thinking back to Roald Dahl’s “The Great Grammatizator.”
There is a great Roald Dahl story where essentially an engineer devises a way to write a story. In this doomsday scenario, someone can just give the machine a plot and it will spit out a final novel. The insinuation there is that they are producing novels that are so formulaic and basic. The protagonist in that story chooses not to join the operation of the machine and fights against it by creating his own writing and art.
I definitely think that this book, if you are into writing, will answer a lot of questions for you and definitely change the way you think about some things, but ultimately there is really no replacement for ideas that make people think and scenes that make people fearful or connect with the characters. This book is looking at the craft of writing and not necessarily how to create a memorable story. This book is not trying to engineer a perfect novel, and I don’t think we are as close to that as some people may fear.
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Megan Gambino
Megan Gambino is an editor and writer for Smithsonian.com and founded “Document Deep Dive.” Previously, she worked for Outside magazine in New Mexico.
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Print Marked Items
Blatt, Ben: NABOKOV'S FAVORITE WORD IS
MAUVE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Jan. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Blatt, Ben NABOKOV'S FAVORITE WORD IS MAUVE Simon & Schuster (Adult Nonfiction) $25.00 3, 14 ISBN:
978-1-5011-0538-8
Literary criticism by the numbers.Writers write--and write and write. In fact, notes former Slate staffer Blatt (co-author:
I Don't Care if We Never Get Back: 30 Games in 30 Days on the Best Worst Baseball Road Trip Ever, 2014), they
write more once they get going than when they started. A useful example is J.K. Rowling, whose first Harry Potter
book came in at 78,000 words--but who wrote a follow-up three times as long. "If the unknown Rowling had written an
870-page version of the first book in 1997," writes the author, "it would likely have had a much harder time getting
published (and getting readers to pick it up)." We are able to know things such as book inflation by applying techniques
of big data to the corpus of literature. In Blatt's opening examples, the discussion centers on adverbs, which writers
such as Stephen King and Ernest Hemingway have scorned. By doing part-of-speech searches of whole books or even
just looking for words that end in -ly (only one class of adverb, as Blatt notes), we can see that those two authors didn't
always practice what they preached--and again, that Hemingway's early, harder-worked books were leaner than his later
ones, True at First Light being almost twice as adverbial as The Sun Also Rises. One takeaway for writers: "The best
books--the greats of the greats--do use a lower rate of -ly adverbs." Statistical approaches to literature have sometimes
produced barren results, but Blatt has obvious fun poking around in the stacks, conducting literary experiments that
sometimes turn into object lessons: if you want to write like a Brit, use "brilliant," but not too much, lest you sound like
an American trying to sound like a Brit. If you want to avoid ridicule, avoid cliches like "past history." And always
avoid opening with the weather--unless you're Danielle Steel. If you want to know how many times Chuck Palahniuk
uses the verb "snuff," this is just the thing. Illuminating entertainment for literary readers.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Blatt, Ben: NABOKOV'S FAVORITE WORD IS MAUVE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2017. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA477242498&it=r&asid=d16ebf1c13fc956cd5d738650adcb009.
Accessed 18 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A477242498
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Blatt, Ben: I DON'T CARE IF WE NEVER GET
BACK
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 1, 2014):
COPYRIGHT 2014 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Blatt, Ben I DON'T CARE IF WE NEVER GET BACK Grove (Adult Nonfiction) $24.00 5, 6 ISBN: 978-0-8021-
2274-2
Two former Harvard Lampoon writers attempt a road trip of epic logistical proportions: 30 baseball games in 30
stadiums in 30 days. The road-trip memoir has become so tired that there's almost no premise good enough to resurrect
it from endless clich�, and a frenetic race to an arbitrary goal didn't seem promising. But that wasn't
accounting for two things: Moneyball-worthy mathematical algorithms and the sharp, hilarious prose that has made
Lampoon alums famous for generations. Slate writer Blatt is passionate about two things: math and baseball. His travel
companion, Brewster, is passionate about neither. But when Blatt wrote a computer program that plotted out the trip-an
entire game every day, hitting every stadium, using only a car-Brewster reluctantly agreed to join his friend. The math
assured the pair that the trip was possible, albeit illogical (requiring several dizzying loops of the country) and stupid
(the average leg between games was a 12-hour drive). But math also didn't account for things like weather, traffic and
human error, turning what should have been a month of leisurely summer fun into a suspenseful series of high-speed
hauls through the night. Blatt and Brewster pepper their adventure with statistics-there was, they cheerfully point out in
response to parental concerns, only a 0.5 percent chance that they would die in a vehicular accident-and anecdotes. At
one point, they even constructed an OK Cupid profile for the romantically challenged Blatt and set him up with a date
to a St. Louis Cardinals game. Our intrepid narrators are charmingly self-deprecating and keenly aware of the
pointlessness of their journey, and yet they still imbue it with some meaningful thoughts about friendship, community,
and the beauty and total absurdity of obsessive fandom. Nate Silver numbers and James Thurber wit turn what should
be a harebrained adventure into a pretty damn endearing one.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Blatt, Ben: I DON'T CARE IF WE NEVER GET BACK." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2014. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA359848007&it=r&asid=45cb91d4f25396d021bc97ca04f8d5ad.
Accessed 18 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A359848007
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I Don't Care If We Never Get Back: 30 Games in
30 Days on the Best Worst Baseball Road Trip
Ever
Alan Moores
Booklist.
110.16 (Apr. 15, 2014): p11.
COPYRIGHT 2014 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
I Don't Care If We Never Get Back: 30 Games in 30 Days on the Best Worst Baseball Road Trip Ever. By Ben Blatt
and Eric Brewster. May 2014.368p. Grove, $24 (9780802122742); paper (9780802192165). 796.3.
First, this book--about the authors' successful attempt to attend an entire game in each of the 30 Major League parks in
30 days during the 2013 season--is moronically contrived, and at a cost of some 22,000 miles' worth of fossil fuels.
And if the banter between these two knuckleheads, one a Harvard senior and the other a recent Harvard grad, is meant
to be funny, it kind of isn't: for instance, their Yankee Stadium MVP seats were "so close to the action you had a
legitimate chance of being named the player of the game." Still, stacking together these 30 stadiums, one after the
other, is a great way to contrast and compare the unique experience each of them offers fans. And, almost despite
themselves, Blatt and Brewster make some wonderfully salient points: "It made far more sense to root for the success
of your favorite doctor than it did for your favorite player." A quirky book that just might draw a crowd.--Alan Moores
Moores, Alan
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Moores, Alan. "I Don't Care If We Never Get Back: 30 Games in 30 Days on the Best Worst Baseball Road Trip Ever."
Booklist, 15 Apr. 2014, p. 11. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA366459611&it=r&asid=1da9f9f31c9b8c7d225b7b669c489d3a.
Accessed 18 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A366459611
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I Don't Care If We Never Get Back: 30 Games in
30 Days on the Best Worst Baseball Road Trip
Ever
Publishers Weekly.
261.9 (Mar. 3, 2014): p57.
COPYRIGHT 2014 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
I Don't Care If We Never Get Back: 30 Games in 30 Days on the Best Worst Baseball Road Trip Ever
Ben Blatt and Eric Brewster. Grove, $24 (368p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2274-2
When sports analyst and baseball fanatic Blatt first came up with an algorithm that figured out how one could see every
pitch of 30 baseball games in 30 different ballparks in 30 days, it seemed like a pipe dream. That is, until his best friend
Brewster, who "didn't like baseball," agreed to come along for the 22,000-mile ride. As expected on such as trip, the
games themselves take a backseat, so those looking for exciting sports writing or an in-depth baseball history best look
elsewhere. It also takes a little time getting used to the writing combination of two different third-person narratives plus
the first-person plural as well as the way the friends talk in witty rejoinders (Eric: "I thought you didn't want
children."/Ben: "But everyone wants grandchildren"). The story doesn't start to get interesting till something bad
happens, and here it occurs about a third of the way through the trip when Ben messes up the start time for the Rockies
game, putting the 30-in-30 streak in serious jeopardy. As the two friends put their heads together to figure out how to
salvage the trip, the journey picks up steam, and from there it's the fun road trip/ballpark adventure with pranks, missed
exits, a misadventure with a scalper, and a sell-out on the worst possible day that has you rooting for them to
accomplish their goal. The result, like any good road trip tale, is less about the destination and more about the bonds
formed and experiences had trying to get there, and in that respect Blatt and Brewster have definitely scored. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"I Don't Care If We Never Get Back: 30 Games in 30 Days on the Best Worst Baseball Road Trip Ever." Publishers
Weekly, 3 Mar. 2014, p. 57+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA360679601&it=r&asid=d5d6355db4c73ae826e004babe068ced.
Accessed 18 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A360679601
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Reading by Numbers
By JOHN WILLIAMSMARCH 9, 2017
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It was only a matter of time before big data came for literature.
Ben Blatt’s new book, “Nabokov’s Favorite Word Is Mauve,” slices and dices the texts of classic and contemporary books to generate charts and graphs with titles like: “Use of Exclamation Points per 100,000 Words in Elmore Leonard’s Novels.”
“You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose,” Leonard once wrote about the enthusiastic punctuation mark. He actually used 49 per 100,000 words, according to Blatt, but that still makes him the stingiest of the writers Blatt surveyed. You might guess Tom Wolfe would be the obvious leader of the exclamatory pack, and he’s close. But his 929 per 100,000 words comes in second to James Joyce’s 1,105.
Who uses the most clichés? (Like much else in Blatt’s book, the definition of cliché is both explained at length and open for debate.) James Patterson has the highest rate, and Jane Austen the lowest, but there are still surprises. Veronica Roth, author of the best-selling Divergent series, relies on them less than William Faulkner did, and F. Scott Fitzgerald called on them more (just) than Ayn Rand.
Blatt studied applied mathematics at Harvard, and while some of his charts require wonky parsing before diving in (Percent of Non-Neutral Speaking Verbs That Are “Loud”), others are immediately understandable, like the one showing that after a critically acclaimed debut, 72 percent of novelists publish a longer second book.
Quotable
“Fiction stymies me with its possibility. In nonfiction . . . the constriction turns it into a puzzle, and I love puzzles. I would rather transform or solve something than invent it, I guess.” — Melissa Febos, author of “Abandon Me,” in an interview with the Rumpus
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From Sherlock to Melrose
Benedict Cumberbatch — Oscar-nominated actor, Sherlock Holmes avatar and widely adored dreamboat — has signed on to star in and executive produce Showtime’s “Melrose,” a five-part adaptation of Edward St. Aubyn’s highly acclaimed series of Patrick Melrose novels.
David Nicholls, who has adapted Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens for the screen, in addition to his own novel “One Day,” will write all five episodes.
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In The Times, Michiko Kakutani wrote about St. Aubyn’s “remarkable” series: “The books are written with an utterly idiosyncratic combination of emotional precision, crystalline observation and black humor, as if one of Evelyn Waugh’s wicked satires about British aristos had been mashed up with a searing memoir of abuse and addiction, and injected with Proustian meditations on the workings of memory and time.”
A version of this article appears in print on March 12, 2017, on Page BR4 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Reading by Numbers. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
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BOOK REVIEWS / NONFICTION0
Nabokov’s Favorite Word Is Mauve by Ben Blatt
BY JEFF ALFORD · MAY 21, 2017
Nabokov's Favorite Word is Mauve by Ben Blatt
Simon & Schuster, 2017
★★★☆☆
In 2002, bookstores were enthralled by the card-counting gamblers from MIT in Ben Mezrich’s Bringing Down the House; a year later Michael Lewis’ 2003 book Moneyball showed that baseball could be gamed apart into statistical trends. In 2010, Nate Silver’s statistics-and-politics blog FiveThirtyEight was licensed to the New York Times and in 2012 he and his team presented a nearly perfect prediction of the year’s election results. In 2016, he and nearly every statistically-minded news outlet blew it with a miscomputation heard around the world surrounding a presidency that no one saw coming. While history and the analysis of convenient trends can illuminate certain possible trajectories, there are other variables at play that simply cannot be factored into a statistician’s coding.
In Nabokov’s Favorite Word Is Mauve, Ben Blatt ignores the unreliability of game theory and the fatigue that has recently seeped from the political spectrum and attempts to untangle trends in the world of books. By running the numbers on word choice, frequency, and paragraph structure, he believes that an unspoken truth will emerge regarding our collective literary intake. “By looking at the patterns,” he writes, “we can appreciate that beautiful moment where the pattern breaks, and where a brilliant new idea bursts into the world.”
Thanks to the recent ebook revolution, Blatt is now able to review and analyze books on the computer. It’s important to note, however, that this analysis is little more than interpreting the results of a “ctrl+f” search of a PDF ebook. “The research won’t be very complex,” he explains in his introduction, and that he’s simply reframing books so that they can viewed “through a statistical lens.” To kick his research off, Blatt discusses the fascinating story of two scientists in the 60s who analyzed the unattributed essays in the Federalist Papers by poring over recurrences of words like “whilst” and “upon” and linking them to other attributed texts by Madison or Hamilton that have a parallel frequency of those words. The Mosteller-Wallace tests solved a major historical mystery and psychologically exposed that people have an inherent tendency to lean on certain words when building sentences.
This sort of rigor does not translate well to the contemporary literary canon. Nabokov’s Favorite Word Is Mauve is full of charts (appropriately rendered in a lovely pale purple), but the book begins to read like a compilation of graphs that nobody ever needed to see. While it’s interesting to learn that the word “she” appears once in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit while the word “he” appears just under 1,900 times, that Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham uses only fifty words in total, and that Annie Proulx and Virginia Woolf pinged on a test as being authors of some of the most “masculine” classic novels, much of Blatt’s studies veer far from the realm of classics and settle upon authors who have cranked out a lot of books. This results in a slew of who-cares graphs outlining the use of exclamation points in Elmore Leonard novels, or the use of “thought verbs” in Chuck Palahniuk’s fourteen schlocky books. Blatt devotes many pages to fanfiction and people adopting the styles of their source material, and while psychologically interesting, Blatt ends up graphing out things like the “Percent of Hunger Games Fan Fiction that Uses Brilliant More Often Than J.K. Rowling” (if you can even make sense of that and are curious to know the answer, authors based in the UK come in at 13% and those in the US at only 3%).
While Blatt tries to bring in Salinger, Pynchon, and contemporary names like Jonathan Franzen and Donna Tartt, he does little with their work besides including their books in a pool of contemporary literary fiction, which he then evaluates as a whole. I suspect that they were left out of Blatt’s more detailed studies because their numbers didn’t work to his advantage. It’s far easier to plot statistical trends when a formulaic author has fifty or so books under their name. In the chapter about cliched first sentences and the prevalence of bad lines about weather, there’s no mention of Madeline L’Engle’s complicated and cheeky recycling of “It was a dark and stormy night”; instead Blatt presents two whole pages of opening sentences by Nora Roberts, as 42 of her 92 books open with a mention of the weather.
While frequently delightful and full of curious statistical discoveries, readers will feel a vague uneasiness over whether or not they’re the intended audience for this sort of book. A title like Nabokov’s Favorite Word Is Mauve invokes a vague literary standard, but when readers reach the section where Blatt analyzes word frequency and the suggestion that writers might inherently lean on certain exotic favorites, they’ll find just as thorough there a discussion about Michael Connelly. Based on the comparable page-space devoted to Nabokov and mauve, “Michael Connelly’s favorite word is nodded” would have been just as worthy a title, although it’s certainly not as catchy. Having Nabokov in the title feels like a trick, as so much of the book is about writers like Stephen King, Nora Roberts, and James Patterson. In a book about statistics and how much percentage of a text is devoted to certain ideas, it’s tempting to parse out how much of this work is relevant to a lover of literature and how much is left dealing with the poppiest corners of the book industry.
About Latest Posts
Jeff Alford
Jeff Alford
Jeff Alford is a critic and book collector based in Brooklyn, NY and the Managing Editor of Run Spot Run. He is a contributor to Kirkus Reviews, Rain Taxi Review of Books and the New Orleans Review and author of the rare books and small press blog www.theoxenofthesun.com.
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