Ooh! A Question about Lexical Density

(Beth Turnage Blog) What are the possible factors that lessens the lexical density in writing?? A question in a comment? Yes! I was so tickled that I decided to devote an entire blog post to it. And I won’t just tell you. I’ll show you, and to do so...

The Craft of #Writing: Brain Secrets of Lexical Density

Writing is hard. Difficult. Okay, it’s the kick in your stomach when you are working like a demon to scrape the words out of your dissolute soul.The words refuse to arrive like the A-list celebrities you invited to your party. Your characters snottily refuse to talk to you, your...

The Craft of #Writing: Lexical Density Compared to Writing Rules

I took some creative license in the title because we all know there aren’t any rules in writing. There is just some incredibly strong advice. The “rules” vary widely from writer to writer and even from genre to genre. But there do seem to be a few general “rules”...

The Craft of Writing: Lexical Density and You

According to the study, Success with Style: Using Writing Style to Predict the Success of Novels, by Stony Brook University’s Vikas Gajingunte Ashok, Song Feng, and Yejin Choi, whether or not a book will sell can be determined by several quantifiable factors. The researchers downloaded classic literature from the...

Wordsmithery: ignite your #writing with best-selling-author metrics

Having worked as a ghostwriter for eight years, writing nearly every day while working quickly and efficiently sparked my need to develop ninja wordsmithing skills. And for this, I turned to machine-editing tools. When I first started, I suffered some backlash from my writing friends. The common sentiment was...

The #Writer’s Craft: Word Counts, Story Length & Story Structure

(Beth Turnage Blog) I’ve written several posts on Quora on writing and thought I’d curate some here. You can call it laziness, but really it’s a lack of time since ghostwriting is keeping me very busy. Really. 😉 How do word count limitations affect what you can fit into...

The Craft of #Writing: Beware the Adverb Nazis.

Pro-Writing Aid, an online program that analyzes your writing and gives you recommendations to improve it. As I was looking at a report on a piece it gave the number of adverbs and recommended that I remove three. I must have missed this before but I do tend to...

The #Writing Craft: #Write Like A Best Selling #Author

In which I examine Pro-Writing Aid recommendations against the efforts of published best-sellers. In the previous three articles in this series we’ve looked at the findings of a group of researchers at Stony Brook University that linked lexical density to a book’s success, at lexical density compared to writing...

The Craft of Writing: 200 Most Common Words As Parts of Speech

Two hundred words are said to comprise eighty percent of all English sentences. Here is the list broken down into parts of speech. Why? Because you should know what weapons you are hurling at an unsuspecting public. It’s been nigh many years when the nuns at my Catholic grammar...