Introduction to Digital Humanities

The idea of using recognizable patterns in word choice as a hallmark of writing style isn’t anything new in today’s age, although it appears it may have been in 1963. Mosteller and Wallace’s statistical approach to the authorship of the federalist papers was revolutionary and proved that James Madison was, in fact, the author of the twelve disputed works. Upon hearing this, I went to look up how many papers were each written by Madison, Jay, and Hamilton as snippets from “Non-Stop” echoed through my mind. I wanted to see if the information in Lin Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton was correct, and it is. The specific numbers were not mentioned by Platt in his introduction, but John Jay did in fact write five of the papers, James Madison did write 29, and Alexander Hamilton (his name is Alexander Hamilton) did write the other 51.               Platt goes on to talk about the correlation between -ly adverbs and what constitutes “good writing” especially when it comes to the theories of Ernest Hemingway and his notorious hatred of adverbs. As I read the read the chapter, I was surprised to find the correlation between the two so significant. Obviously, correlation is not causation, and I think the -ly adjectives are symptomatic of a larger aspect of “good writing.” To give some background to this, I work as an editor for The Inscape Journal, a creative writing journal that publishes three main genres: Fiction, Poetry, and Creative Non-Fiction. As you can imagine, though all three genres are creative writing, the conventions of each genre differ and at the beginning of each semester as part of orientation for the new student volunteers, the senior editing staff goes over their criteria for what makes a good piece in each of the genres and always mentions concision or compression or economy of words, which all mean the same thing, they’re just different words used to describe the deliberate and focused use of word choice. In part, it’s often a more focused piece that has something to say and tries to say it in the most eloquent yet efficient way possible which makes a piece more enjoyable to read. It’s also a sign that the author has meticulously reviewed and workshopped their piece before they submit to the journal. Another thing -ly adjectives can do, as mentioned by Platt, is pull a reader out of the story. There’s a lot of ways to do this and awkward word choice is certainly one of them as is wordiness. Word choice and sentence length affect the pace of a piece and no one wants to read a piece they feel is dragging on forever. So, for all you writers out there, be aware that precise writing is one of the most common criteria even a volunteer staff is looking for when evaluating how publishable your work may be and maybe it’s worth the time to run your own writing through some statistical algorithms.