Education: Adjectives v. Verbs

Psychologists, who breathe statistics as a salamander breathes fire, love to count things. They count and classify words to determine what books children should read, what children’s classics should be rewritten, how intelligent grown-up readers are. Last week a Chicago psychologist came up with a word-counting formula for measuring not readers but writers. Goateed, Russian-born Dr. David Pablo Boder, head of the psychology department at Lewis Institute (a technical school) and director of its Psychological Museum, called his formula the Adjective-Verb Quotient.

Not to be confused with the I. Q. (intelligence quotient), the A. V. Q. is a measure of the ratio of adjectives to verbs in a sample of writing (i.e., an A. V. Q. of 50 means that there are 50 adjectives to every 100 verbs). A few psychologists who had studied writing and speaking style before Dr. Boder concluded that an individual with an “active” (verby) style was likely to be dynamic, restless, emotionally unstable, that one with a “qualitative” style (many nouns and adjectives) was more stable, reflective, mature, intellectual.

Dr. Boder used his formula to measure private letter-writing, plays, poetry, modern fiction, legal phraseology, scientific reports, the writings of a few famed authors. Altogether he counted 160,000 words. Findings:

> Of the four major types of writing, plays (i.e., dialogue) had the fewest adjectives (average A. V. Q.: 11); laws were next (A. V. Q.: 20), then fiction (35) and scientific writing (75).

> Relatively barren of adjectives were business letters (19), private letters by inexperienced writers (22); abounding in adjectives were advertisements (78) and Ph. D. theses (88). Poetry struck a golden mean (36).

> Writers use more adjectives than speakers, because they have more time.

> The fewer adjectives, the easier writing is to read.

> Scientists have no consideration for their readers.

> The late Columnist Arthur Brisbane used about 42 adjectives per 100 verbs; H. L. Mencken, about 73.

> The late James Gibbons Huneker used relatively few adjectives (25) in his letters to men, twice as many in his letters to women.

> Dr. Boder could not decide how the A. V. Q. is affected by age. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who kept his Journals more than 50 years, used more adjectives (59) in his youth than in his old age (37). Philosopher William James, in his 40s used many more adjectives in his letters to women than to men; in his 60s, the other way around.