Grammar girl here, I love rules, and I believe that humans are wired to see patterns, even

where patterns don't exist.

So it's no surprise that I'm a sucker for headlines like this one.

Scientists find the secret to writing a best-selling novel.

The researchers claim that their computer model can predict which novels will be successful

with 84% accuracy.

And that secret is tied to parts of speech, I'm even more intrigued.

The first rule they say they've uncovered is to use certain parts of speech.

The Stony Brook researchers found that successful novels contained more prepositions, nouns,

pronouns, determiners, and adjectives than less successful novels, and that quote, less

successful books are characterized by a higher percentage of verbs, adverbs, and foreign

words, unquote.

In the adventure genre, they broke down verbs further.

Books with thinking or quoting verbs, such as recognized, remembered, and said, were

more successful than books with more emotional, action-oriented verbs, such as went, glare,

shout, and jump.

They noted that these part of speech markers suggest that successful novels tend to be

written in a more journalistic style than less successful novels, which tend to have

more sentiment-laden words.

An author and writing teacher I like named David Farland wrote about the study and noted

that books with lots of nouns and adjectives could be spending more time developing the

setting.

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