stevenberlinjohnson.com

Twitter

Okay, I caved. I'm twittering. Something about this trip to Europe made me finally sign up. We'll see how it turns out, but thus far it is pretty fun, though keeping to the 140 characters is pretty difficult for those of us who like to write 73 word sentences. I've got the last three posts running under the picture to the right, and you can follow me at Twitter.com/stevenbjohnson.

Literary Style By The Numbers

This may be old news to some of you, but I just noticed the other day that Amazon has added a whole panel of "text stats" for many of its books. I noticed it because my last book The Ghost Map just came out in paperback (go read it people --  it's a lot more fun than this post will turn out to be) and so I'm back into the swing of checking Amazon a few times a day. Text Stats is a pretty wonky page -- everything from some of the "readability" indices, to overall word count, to what Amazon calls "Fun stats" like "Words per dollar." (Quotes you never hear at Barnes and Noble: "This copy of Infinite Jest is such a bargain at only 39,574 words per dollar!")

But the two stats that I found totally fascinating were "Average Words Per Sentence" and "% Complex Words," the latter defined as words with three or more syllables -- words like "ameliorate", "protoplasm" or "motherf***er." I've always thought that sentence length is a hugely determining factor in a reader's perception of a given work's complexity, and I spent quite a bit of time in my twenties actively teaching myself to write shorter sentences. So this kind of material is fascinating to me, partially because it lets me see something statistically that I've thought a great deal about intuitively as a writer, and partially because I can compare my own stats to other writers' and see how I fare. (Perhaps there's a literary Rotisserie league lurking somewhere on those Text Stats pages.)

So I spent a few hours last week plugging in the numbers for my books, as well as a few other authors that I assembled in an entirely unscientific fashion: Malcolm Gladwell, Steven Pinker, Seth Godin, Christopher Hitchens -- and then, just to see how far I'd come, I threw in my intellectual (and, sadly, stylistic) heroes from my early twenties, the post-structuralist legends Michel Foucault and Frederic Jameson.  I compiled stats for 3-4 books for each author, except Gladwell who has written two, and then plotted them on a scatter chart, with  the y axis representing % complex words and the x axis representing words per sentence. The results were pretty fascinating:

Some observations:

1. There's a clear cluster of Hitchens/Johnson/Pinker in the center. (From eyeballing some other Amazon pages, I think Dawkins, Michael Pollan, E. O. Wilson would have been in that general area as well.) But what I thought was so striking was that even in that cluster, each author's books are closer to his other books than they are to the other two author's books. In other words, each of us has a certain sweet spot of complexity that we come back to book after book. My first and last books, Ghost Map and Interface Culture had the exact same words per sentence, down to the decimal point: 24.6. (My longest sentences turned out to be in Emergence, followed closely by Everything Bad at 25.8 and 25.7.) Pinker tends to be just slightly less complex syntactically (with the one outlier Blank Slate, which is more complex than anything I've written.) And Hitchens tends to write longer sentences by a couple of words.

2. Gladwell's sentences are fully 25% shorter than mine. I'm not sure if the average reader would notice the difference between the Johnson/Hitchens/Pinker cluster, but a 25% drop in sentence length has to alter the reading experience dramatically. Clearly, the only things separating me from selling ten million copies of my books are those extra 6.5 words per sentence.

3. Check out Foucault and Jameson. They are literally on another planet. The top spot goes to Jameson's "Postmodernism" book which I read like scripture my first year of grad school: 53 words per sentence! Interestingly, most of the variation shows up in sentence length not in word complexity -- you often hear people complain about the impenetrable jargon of critical theory, but it looks here like the sentence length is as least as much of a culprit.

4. I would love to see some stats on dynamic range here: not just average sentence length, but how much the sentence lengths vary over the course of each book. One of the things I learned when I started writing in a less academic style (largely when I was doing FEED) is the importance of throwing in a very short sentence for emphasis at regular intervals. (Come to think of it, I may have learned this from reading Gladwell's early pieces in the New Yorker.)

5. Is there a Literature grad school version of the Lazy Web? If so, I would love to see a study that cross-referenced sales and syntactical complexity across thousands of books and determined who had the highest sales-to-complexity ratio of all time.

6. After looking at the Jameson number, I went back to one of my papers from junior year at Brown to see how awful my prose was. I pulled up the scariest sentence in the first paragraph and did a quick word count: 75 words. 75! And no semi-colons either. I bet Fred Jameson's pretty psyched I never finished that PhD...

Apple Opens Up

It struck me yesterday reading Steve Jobs' personal note about plans for third-party apps on the iPhone that the most telling thing about the announcement was the opening five-word phrase:

Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February.

Let me just say it. What we're starting to see here (and of course in the anti-DRM letter from earlier this year) is a pretty significant shift in Jobs' public relations strategy, in that he seems to have recognized that there are limits to secrecy. Yes, some developments are best kept under wraps for as long as possible -- like the iPhone or the Intel switch -- contrary to all the principles of Web 2.0 openness and transparency. But with other decisions, you're sometimes much better off going public early, and exposing some of your thought process when you do. I had been thinking about posting something over the past week or two about the iPhone SDK issue, arguing that if Apple indeed was planning on opening up the platform sometime in the nearish future, there was absolutely no reason not to announce those plans -- unlike release specs for, say, the iPhone, keeping the SDK plans secret wasn't a competitive advantage in any sense, and it was bringing on a ton of ill will from people who would otherwise be iPhone fanatics.

But as it turns out, I didn't need to write that post, because Jobs decided to go public with Apple's plans, even if they weren't fully-formed. That suggests to me that he's still evolving as a CEO and as a PR wizard, still capable of adapting to new situations -- yet another reason for Apple's competitors to be nervous.

Here's my big question, though: I wonder whether Apple had the SDK as part of its plans all along, and merely changed its mind about whether to go public with it in response to the criticism -- or were they truly debating the merits of opening up the platform, and thus reluctant to say anything until they were 100% sure of their plans?

Wonderful essay by Andrew Blum about "Jane Jacobs in an Age of Global Change":

Jacobs fought modernist urban planning’s “dishonest mask of pretended order,” and what concerns me today about cities is a corollary: Call it the dishonest mask of pretended localism. Thanks in great part to Jacobs, we talk a lot about preserving neighborhoods, which most often means keeping them the way they are. But for me, preserving an urban community—not merely its architecture, its open space, or its independently owned stores—now means recognizing what the local is made of, the warp and weft of all its pieces, wherever they come from, near or far. And that requires recognizing the global community behind it—for better or worse, in the face of both nostalgia and change.

A Brief Outside.in Update

Some of you might have seen that we just closed another round of financing for outside.in, raising $1.5M this time from the same stellar group of investors. We've made a few great additions to the team, including some new folks on the business side of the operation who are making my life as CEO much easier. We spent most of the summer moving the site over to a new database structure (and to Ruby on Rails) which will let us do a lot of cool new things in the coming months. The new version should be live in the next week or so -- I'll post more about that when it goes up.

Ghost Map in paper (and more!)

The Ghost Map is officially out in paperback this week, sporting a great new cover and layout, with quotes from all the very flattering reviews we got last fall. It's fun when you see that first copy of the paperback, because all those reviews that you read so intensely a year ago have faded in your memory, and suddenly you get to revisit them all as a group. (It's also fun because the marketing people at your publisher have carefully excised anything that doesn't sound like a complete rave.) The Riverhead folks have also put together a pretty cool web site for the paperback -- with suggested reading links, video interviews with me, review quotes, and a pretty wild little animated film that I can only describe as "Yellow Submarine meets 28 Days Later." For those of you curious about the macro themes of the book, that first interview clip of me is, I think, the best summary of why those ten days in 1854 are so important to us today. (Other than the summary you get from, you know, actually reading the book.)

The other cool thing we just found out is that Ghost Map has been chosen as one of two finalists for the National Academies of Science 2007 Communications Award. In this case, "finalist" means "runner up" -- but the winner was one of my heroes, Eric Kandel, and it's a great honor just to be mentioned in the same press release with him. (Also winning, in different categories: the sublime Carl Zimmer, who gave me an insane amount of great advice at early stage writing Ghost Map, and the Radio Lab team, with whom I've collaborated on a couple of fun shows.)