10. The Frequency of "And"

Let’s begin by defining what I call the AF, or And Frequency. It’s just the percentage of the total number of words that are the word “and.”

Moretti and Pestre established a basic reference point of 2.6% for well-edited material. An assistant and I found roughly the same thing when we analyzed ten articles each from The New York Times and The New Yorker. Both averages were right around 2.5%.

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So add the AF to your narrative tool box. It goes well with the Narrative Index and is even simpler to calculate.

The AF and the Narrative Index generally correlate inversely— a boring text has a low narrative index and a high AF, yet the AF still tells you a little bit more about editing.