The Writer’s Diet reads Edward Lear’s nonsense rhymes

Nonsense rhymes by Edward Lear were diagnosed as “lean” pieces of writing by The Writer’s Diet. Why? 

 

 

 

 

At a first glance, one may think that these rhymes are diagnosed as “lean” because the tool ignores the many capitalised nouns and adjectives contained within them.

 

But if you pay more attention to the capitalised words, you will see that they are all vivid, colourful, and specific descriptors (even if some of the adjectives are also “dolomphious” and “fizzgiggious” nonsense!)

 

Changing mid-sentence capitalized letters to lower case letters does place the use of “academic ad-words” in the “flabby” category. But even that only slightly alters the overall test result for Lear’s work, which now becomes “fit and trim”:

 

 

 

Overall, the tool worked well. Note that Lear has not used a single weak verb (“to be”) in this sample.

 

 

 

The Writer’s Diet version available in 2019 was used in this experiment.