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pennym_'s review
informative
fast-paced
4.0
quick, interesting, and well-rounded exploration of the topic!
angelamichelle's review
3.0
Some interesting data crunching a la Book of Mormon word print analysis. I was most interested in the chapters measuring incidences of -ly adverbs and exclamation points.
crickedcactus's review
4.0
Super duper interesting from a linguistics point of view. Very engaging and accesible
thepamz's review
5.0
Según yo iba a hojear este libro nada más y acabé leyéndolo completo porque tiene tanta información de análisis de los autores que casi se siente como chisme y es súper entretenido ¿Que autores abusan de los adverbios? ¿Que autores tienen las mejores frases de apertura y cuáles las peores? Todo con estadísticas y gráficas de respaldo.
erboe501's review
2.0
In a Digital Studies course in college I played around with some of the methods Blatt uses to extrapolate about writing and authors, so that level of understanding was fun. But I couldn't help feeling like Blatt's assertions were all a bit of a stretch. He acknowledges the limitations of his data sets and generalizations, but that doesn't change that we maybe shouldn't make sweeping statements about British v. American writers, for example, based on some fan fiction. There's a lot of attention paid to thriller and mass market fiction, which I don't read so was not very interesting to me.
While offering some thought-provoking ideas, and while I don't consider myself averse to how data and numbers can relate and co-exist with literature, I didn't find this especially enlightening.
While offering some thought-provoking ideas, and while I don't consider myself averse to how data and numbers can relate and co-exist with literature, I didn't find this especially enlightening.
bluestjuice's review
3.0
Take statistics, apply it to literature, and you get this book. Sound crazy? Maybe a little, but it was also quite entertaining. As someone who struggled through my college statistics course, I was slightly apprehensive, but really the math here is quite basic - it's the computer program algorithms that Blatt was able to run by downloading the text of thousands of works of fiction (plus massive collections of fan fiction and amateur erotica) and trawling through them for data. This provided fascinating insights like the breakdown of which authors use more exclamation marks in their writing, and who uses more 'Britishisms' in their writing: British authors or American authors who are trying to sound British? None of what's contained within this slim volume is going to shatter any minds, or really give you insight into writing the next great American novel. But it was fun to read, as just the idea of applying mathematical insights to the world of literature is a novel one.