Recently, New York Times Magazine writer Clive Thompson discussed an intriguing tool to help writers evaluate (and improve) their writing style. The tool (developed by Adam J. Calhoun) is basically a program that codes and displays only the punctuations from a set of prose. The results are astounding. For example, there is a huge visual difference between the prose of “Moby Dick” and that of “The Old Man And The Sea”.
Thompson also allows readers to plug in some of their own prose to see what emerges. So, I took the challenge. The image above is a visualization of a report I recently wrote. Now, not surprisingly, there are a lot of percentage marks—I was, after all, writing about survey data. But what also jumps out is the large number of parenthetical phrases and dash marks—and a puzzling amount of semi-colons. That’s an awful lot of additional “explanatory” stuff that probably doesn’t materially enhance the reader’s comprehension. Now that I think of it, I did a lot of that in this piece!
So, thanks to Clive Thompson, I’m going to be a little more careful about my long explanatory jaunts—and try to be more precise to begin with. Although my current style does have a somewhat visually artistic flair—sort of.