Robert Louis Stevenson: Build a web

He wrote Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in six days, but he wasn’t in too big a hurry to mind the web of “sound patterns” essential to the delicate art of constructing sentences, which he elucidates in the first chapter of his 1919 essay collection, The Art of Writing:

Music and literature, the two temporal arts, contrive their pattern of sounds in time; or, in other words, of sounds and pauses. Communication may be made in broken words, the business of life be carried on with substantives alone; but that is not what we call literature; and the true business of the literary artist is to plait or weave his meaning, involving it around itself; so that each sentence, by successive phrases, shall first come into a kind of knot, and then, after a moment of suspended meaning, solve and clear itself. In every properly constructed sentence there should be observed this knot or hitch; so that (however delicately) we are led to foresee, to expect, and then to welcome the successive phrases. The pleasure may be heightened by an element of surprise, as, very grossly, in the common figure of the antithesis, or, with much greater subtlety, where an antithesis is first suggested and then deftly evaded. Each phrase, besides, is to be comely in itself; and between the implication and the evolution of the sentence there should be a satisfying equipoise of sound; for nothing more often disappoints the ear than a sentence solemnly and sonorously prepared, and hastily and weakly finished. Nor should the balance be too striking and exact, for the one rule is to be infinitely various; to interest, to disappoint, to surprise, and yet still to gratify; to be ever changing, as it were, the stitch, and yet still to give the effect of an ingenious neatness.

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Humans find it easy to identify the words that capture the theme of a text – for example, that “whale” is a key word in Moby Dick – but this is a difficult task for computers. Now Marcelo Montemurro, a systems biologist at the University of Manchester, UK, and colleagues have developed a method to identify word importance based on a branch of mathematics called information theory. “It seems that what we call semantics or meaning has a signature at the level of the statistics of words,” says Montemurro.

Simply counting the frequency of words in a text is not enough, as connective words such as “for” and “the” confuse the picture. Important words tend to clump in paragraphs and chapters that deal with the topic they relate to, but this only provides a crude guide, says Montemurro.

For a more detailed analysis, the team calculated the “entropy” of each word, a measure of how evenly distributed it is, in both the original text and in a scrambled version in which the words appeared in a random stream. From the difference between the two entropies multiplied by the frequency of the word, the team generated that word’s “information value” in the text. More

My pal Joel Orr wrote a book titled, “How to read a book in 30 days.” So I bought a book on my Kindle to test his principle. The book had 435 pages. Actually it had more than that but the story itself was just 435 pages. I figured I could read five days a week on average. So figuring 4.3 weeks a month that would give me 21.5 days to read the book, which meant I had to read 20.23 pages a day.

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Despite the fact that Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson’s latest book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, wasn’t released until this week, it has still managed to generate much pre-publication discussion about the future of the digital economy. Anderson found himself enmeshed in a pre-publication plagiarism scandal two weeks ago when the Virginia Quarterly Review found that some passages in the book directly matched Wikipedia entries. (Anderson quickly apologized, blaming inaccurate citing and overall carelessness.)

Then, of course, there’s the actual content of the book, which has been received by journalists and business-minded folks in decidedly polarizing ways. Malcolm Gladwell unleashed a scathing review of Free in last week’s New Yorker, scolding Anderson for adhering to the freeconomy as an “iron law” and writing, “The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws.” (Plenty of responses followed.)

But for Anderson, Free is indeed the ultimate destiny of our economy. “Sooner or later every company is going to have to figure out how to use Free or compete with Free, one way or another,” he writes in the beginning of the book. This assertion will probably look depressingly familiar to journalists who’ve watched their traditional business models fall apart in the wild west of the web, where “free” is the gold standard.  Read more

Check it out!

• Levitin was a rock music ;erformer and producer before deciding to study musicology and neuroscience, so his examples are hip and personal. But he is an eclectic lover of music, and his references to classical music are equally knowledgeable and evocative.
• The book addresses aspects of a question that has troubled me since my childhood: Why does some music make us happy and other music makes us sad? How universal are its effects?
• Levitin is a wonderful scientist, who is able to express strong beliefs while clearly representing opposing views.
• The writing is excellent.

I think the layout could have used a bit more “air.” Paragraphs are very long, and often made me feel a need to take a deep breath before proceeding.

It’s an old saw and true: If you want to write well, read lots of good writing. This book will help.