If you ever wondered whether using certain buzz words in your work will make it more likely that it will be published, here at last is the answer from the candid folks at the Virginia Quarterly Review.
Waldo Jaquith sifted through mounds of submitted and published poetry and identified twelve “cliché” topics. He compared the percentage of times that those topics appeared in submissions with the percentage of times that those submissions were accepted for publication.
The topics, in the order of frequency with which they were submitted, were water, death, blood, stone, bone, poetry, heart, fish, birth, darkness, rust, and cat. If you order the same topics by the frequency with which the poems they appeared in were published, you get this list: water, darkness, stone, death, blood, poetry, bone, birth, heart, fish, cat, and rust.
I have always maintained that there must be a law in Brazil requiring songwriters to include in their lyrics the words “saudade” or “coração” or better yet both “saudade” and “coração” or risk prosecution by the samba police. Now we know that a similar filter is at work in publications like the VQR.
Oh, what disabused times we live!
Palimp | 19-Mar-08 at 5:51 am | Permalink
Miedo me da cuando se pongan los ordenadores a calcular frecuencias de palabras en múltiples textos… todas las muletillas de los escritores saldrán a la luz.
Gonzalo Barr | 19-Mar-08 at 9:26 am | Permalink
Ya existe un programa para detectar el plagio. Funciona identificando pasages similares. Por otro lado, algunos teóricos han reducido el número de tramas universales a trece, otros a siete. Al final descubriremos que no hay nada nuevo bajo el sol!