Many decades ago William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White told us to:

Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn’t been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place… it is nouns and verbs, not their assistants, that give good writing its toughness and color.
The Elements of Style

And now we have the data to prove that they were right all along.

By analyzing my Facebook data set to study the relationship between parts-of-speech and Facebook sharing, I found that adjectives and adverbs don’t perform as well as regular, plain old nouns and verbs.

So re-read your Strunk & White and remember that…

Continuing my series of Facebook data, here’s the flip side to last week’s post on the most shareable words on Facebook.

What I found was that techie and social-media dork favorite topics like Twitter, Google, and the iPhone aren’t very popular with the mainstream Facebook audience. These topics might be hot with the bleeding-edge Twitter crowd, but when you’re targeting the much larger Facebook audience, lay off the trendy web geek stuff.

If you want to know more about my dataset and methods, read this.

It’s another Facebook sharing data post.

I analyzed the words that occurred most often in titles in my dataset and their effect on Facebook sharing and found a set of “highly shareable” words.

What I found was that list-based superlatives like “best” and “most” work pretty well on Facebook and that contain that explains something “why” and “how” also does.

If you want to know more about my dataset and methods, read this.

Continuing my series of Facebook data points, this time I looked at the readability of titles and how that was related to the number of times articles were shared on Facebook.

What I found was that as the reading grade level required to understand the title of an article increased, the number of times it was shared on Facebook decreased. The takeaway? Use simple language if you want to get shared on Facebook.

If you’re curious about my methodology, start by reading this page.

More new Facebook data, continuing this series.

The next Facebook sharing data point I analyzed is the presence of numbers (in digit form, 1 through 9) in titles. In a wide range of marketing arenas digits have been shown to perform very well. They tend to help conversion rates in the form of prices and on social news sites like Digg “Top 10″ style posts have always done well.

The difference isn’t huge but according to my data, articles with digits in their titles tend to be shared more on Facebook than stories without digits. I found that most articles in my data set didn’t use numbers in their titles, and you can see the scale…