Style trumps content, again

From Goodbye, Anecdotes! The Age Of Big Data Demands Real Criticism by Trevor Butterworth.

Yet another article that is both interesting but has a chunk of conclusions to contest.

Here is one of the interesting pieces of information. A graph showing the trade-off between readability and subjectivity of language.

It implies that there is a real trade-off between objective reporting and readability. Obviously there are some writers who are accomplished at being both highly readable and highly objective, but this graph seems to indicate the rarity of combining those two attributes.

When I asked Lim what he thought of the study via email, this, he said, was the pattern that stood out. "This means that at least in terms of the items included in the dataset, the media is opinionated and subjective at the same time that it is rendering these judgments in simplistic, unsubtle terms. This is not an encouraging pattern in journalistic conventions, especially given that the public appears to endorse it (given the correlation between the popularity of a story, its readability, and subjectivity)."

So basically, simplistic opinions trump complex facts. When recast that way it makes sense and matches quotidian experience. But it is kind of depressing if one wishes to brag on wise man Homo sapien.

Also intriguing is this observation.

Even more provocative, when Cristianini et al. looked at the market demographics for the UK publications, they found "no significant correlation between writing style and topics, or between topics and demographics in respect to outlets. Thus, it appears, audiences relate more to writing style than to choice of topic – an interesting finding since prevailing assumptions tend to assume readers respond to both."

This suggests that people, regardless of interests and demographics (presumably including wealth, education, age, etc.), have an innate "style" preference. It would be interesting to know if that preference evolves over time and if so under what circumstances.

Trying to get or keep children reading, that implies that one should focus to a greater extent on finding books that are of a compatible style to that of the reader rather than focusing too much on the content. Right now there is a tendency to assume that a child interested in horse stories will want to read other horse stories and what the research is indicating is that really, you need to look closer at the style of the writing rather than the content.