Thursday, May 18, 2017

Ranking authors by their adverb use

Ranking authors by their adverb use: The famously spare Hemingway used 80 words ending in -ly per 10,000 words of prose; JK Rowling uses 140 adverbs per 10,000 words, and EL James uses 155.

2 comments:

Deb said...

I'll try not to dwell on what those E.L. James adverbs are!

Max Allan Collins said...

I'm not an anti-adverbs guy, or an anti-adjectives guy either. If they add, use 'em; if they're superfluous, or ruin tone, dump 'em. But why abandon any colors in your painter's palette?