Rebel Writers

Dimitris Michailidis

In a letter to one of his students, Mark Twain describes the "modern way of writing English" as using plain, simple language, short words, and brief sentences.

He appears to be particularly opposed to the use of adjectives, which he describes as "fluff and flowers" that weaken when they are close together.

When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them—then the rest will be valuable.

Mark Twain

We analyzed the writing style of some of the greatest works of the 19th century, with one goal in mind: identify the rebels. Those who, instead of conforming to Twain's modern writing rules, chose their own path of long, dragged out sentences full of flowery additives.

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Who uses the most adjectives?

On average, writers use 1.6 adjectives per sentence.

However, two books immediately stand out: Herman Melville's Typee with 3+ adjectives per sentence and James Joyce's Ulysses with 0.9.

But Ulysses is not an exception, as James Joyce is by definition a modern writer. He averages only 1.2 adjectives per sentence on his works.

Although he didn't write in English, Dostoyevsky also appears in the modern camp, averaging 1.3 adjectives per sentence. In his most important work, Crime and Punishment, he only used 1.1 adjectives for each sentence he composed.

On the rebellious side, we see Oscar Wilde with 1.7 adjectives per sentence, and Jane Austen with 2 adjectives in her sentences.

But by far the most elaborate of the lot appears to be Herman Melville. In his magnum opus, Moby Dick he uses 2.4 adjectives per sentence, while he averages more than 2.5 across his works!

Did Mark Twain follow his own advice? Sort of. Compared to his peers, he is an average adjective user, with 1.48 per sentence. The only exception is his historical novel The Prince and the Pauper, which averages 2 adjectives per sentence.

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Who is the most rebellious??

Herman Melville may be a heavy adjective user, but is he also the biggest rebel? To give a final verdict, we need to explore who follows Twain's second advice: write brief sentences. To evaluate this, we added one more measure to our graph, the average number of words per sentence.

At first glance, we notice an interesting pattern. The biggest sentences writers compose, the more adjectives they tend to use.

Typee and Ulysses still stand out as completely opposite structured books.

Some authors, like Joseph Conrad and Leo Tolstoy have a defined style they follow on most of their works.

While others, like Jane Austen and Oscar Wilde keep experimenting with their writing style.

James Joyce and Fyodor Dostoyevsky are the de facto modern writers, abiding by Twain's rules of writing short sentences and avoiding adjectives.

Methodology

The authors were selected for their popularity. Texts for the books were downloaded from Project Gutenberg. We used the spacy library to process and analyze the text. Spacy's english model was used to recognize adjectives.

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