Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service. We're your statistical guide

to the world around us and I'm Tim Halford.

If you spent the summer lying on a beach with a good book or huddled out of the rain with a

good book, you may have noticed patterns emerging in the words the author was using. Did you notice,

for example, that they relied too much on exclamation marks or adverbs? Perhaps? Perhaps not,

but either way, numbers are here to help. You wouldn't generally expect a data journalist to tell

you much about great works of literature, but as you might expect, on more or less, we've found

one who can. Ben Blatt is the author of Nabokov's favourite word is MOVE, and he's been scaring

your favourite novels to see if data can tell us anything about what makes a great writer.

Here's where the idea came from. You know, I'm a huge fan of reading and writing, and I was

reading Stephen King's book on writing, and he had advised that you should not use

L.I. adverbs, for example, he recommends instead of saying, you know, he quickly ran, say he

sprinted, because it's more concise and it gets the point across in a more clear fashion. And this

seems like good advice. It's given it a lot of writing courses, but I wonder now, you know,

if Stephen King follows his own advice, you should be at account all 5 million words. He's

ever written and see does he actually use L.I. adverbs at a smaller rate than other authors? What

about, you know, Hemingway versus EL James or JK Rowling versus John Steinbach? So I kind of

went through thousands of books by hundreds of popular and revered authors to see, for example,

at what rate do they use L.I. adverbs, at what rate do they use long sentences or short sentences,

what are their favorite words? Things along that nature. So I'm already in suspense,

Stephen King. Is he a hypocrite, or does he follow his own advice about using adverbs?

I would say Stephen King is a bit in the middle. Definitely, I would feel a bit harsh against

...