Today’s blog post is about using math to make writing more effective. You should read it!

A couple of months ago, I noticed a curious phrase showing up on lots of blogs.

“You should follow me on Twitter here.”

This phrase stands out for being terse, awkward, even rude. Most people would write “Please…” instead of “You should…” Yet this specific line of clunky self-promo copy spread like the flu. A Google search for that exact phrase returns 154,000 results! (For comparison, a search for “Please follow me on Twitter here” returns 1,690 results.)

We can trace this phenomenon to blogger Dustin Curtis, who used testing to find the optimal way to convince people to follow him on Twitter. “You should follow me on Twitter here” was proven to be the most persuasive sentence. You should read about his experiment here.

I have conflicted feelings about this. On one hand, I don’t want to endorse shoddy writing edited by machines. On the other hand, shouldn’t you use every weapon in your arsenal to make your writing more effective? You should!

I decided to try a test of my own. For the last six weeks, visitors to this blog have been part of an experiment.

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“An ocean cable is not an iron chain, lying cold and dead in the icy depths of the Atlantic. It is a living, fleshy bond between severed portions of the human family, along which pulses of love and tenderness will run backward and forward forever.”

—Henry Field, writing of the first undersea telegraphic cables, quoted in The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage.

Ninety-second Saturday afternoon language lesson!

I was breezing through the story about NBC in today’s Times and smashed into a pair of phrases that I’ve never really been sure about. I looked up both in the dictionary, and of course the Times got both right. (Show-offs!) Here’s what I learned:

“Today the network is in shambles…”

Is it correct to say NBC is in shambles or a shambles? People who work at NBC might dispute this, but grammatically both are correct. Merriam-Webster’s offers two similar definitions of shambles (“a scene or a state of great destruction” or “a scene or a state of great disorder or confusion”) and two usage examples (“The city was a shambles” or “an economy in shambles”). Interesting, another meaning of the word is slaughterhouse.
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Yes, it’s happened: You have lived to see the day when a U.S. coin bears the likeness of President James K. Polk! I pocketed this gem today, courtesy of a Metro North ticket machine.

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Yesterday I got one of those promotional e-mails Amazon sends out all the time….

So what, right? Here’s what: Amazon is making a recommendation based on a book I purchased in September 2000—Nine years ago!

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I’m on vacation and won’t be updating my blog until the week of August 17. See you then!

The last time I took the Amtrak to D.C., in May, I shot some pictures of urban decay seen from the train. There was one particular sign I wanted to photograph—on the side of a warehouse between Trenton and Philadelphia—but it always goes by so fast I’ve never been able to get a shot of it. Until a recent trip to Maryland this past Saturday.

This is a poster for the long-defunct Eastern Airlines Air Shuttle. Note the classic Eastern logo in the lower-left part of the sign. How old is this sign?

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My friend Jeremy recently noticed that an article he and I co-wrote in college was cited in a Wikipedia entry.

Neat! I realize this will sound corny, but I’m still flattered whenever anybody cites something I wrote. Why not be? It’s a signal that somebody considers my work useful and authoritative—what a compliment!

With this in mind, I had to ego-search Wikipedia for my name to see how many times I’ve been cited. The answer is 12 times. And on an odd collection of subjects!

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One great thing about New York is that the longer you live here, the more historical trivia you learn. It’s a bottomless well.

Consider where I work. My office abuts Astor Place, a weird block-and-a-half street between the East and West Villages in New York. It’s part of a tangle of streets that merger near Cooper Union, an area rich in history, arts and architecture. I could fill a page listing all the random stuff that I know has happened there, from Abraham Lincoln speaking to the filming of the original “Taking of Pelham 123″ movie.

Today I read an article about rude behavior at theaters, and it made a passing reference to the Astor Place Riot. Why had I never heard of this? Naturally, there’s an illuminating page about it on Wikipedia.

One hundred sixty years ago, there were two stagings of Macbeth at theaters a few blocks apart, one starring a famous British actor and the other a famous American. Audiences were sharply divided over which actor played the Shakespeare role better. The tension had as much to do with class and nationality as it did with theater. On May 10, 1849, the simmering dispute boiled over into violence. The National Guard used their weapons to restore order. In the end, 25 people were dead and at least 120 were injured.

The riot happened at the Astor Place Theater, which today is known as the more-or-less permanent home of the Blue Man Group.

I just read an interview in Good magazine with Richard Larrick, a Duke business professor who advocates changing the “miles per gallon” standard we use to rate car efficiency. The problem? Basically, mpg statistics mislead our brains.

Larrick and professor Jack Soll have been on a crusade to adopt a “gallons per mile” standard. What’s the difference? Here’s a story about their work from 2008. It says:

“Most people ranked an improvement from 34 to 50 mpg as saving more gas over 10,000 miles than an improvement from 18 to 28 mpg, even though the latter saves twice as much gas. (Going from 34 to 50 mpg saves 94 gallons; but from 18 to 28 mpg saves 198 gallons).

“These mistaken impressions were corrected, however, when participants were presented with fuel efficiency expressed in gallons used per 100 miles rather than mpg. Viewed this way, 18 mpg becomes 5.5 gallons per 100 miles, and 28 mpg is 3.6 gallons per 100 miles — an $8 difference today.“

I had never thought about this before. But it makes sense: The higher the mpg number, the smaller the significance of each mile, because you cover more distance before you need to tap that extra fuel. We are used to thinking each number in a rating scale has the same value. It’s misleading.

The professors are using their math to defend small improvements in low-mileage vehicles—a strong argument for hybrid SUVs, which are scoffed at by most environmentally minded people. In fact, it makes a big difference. Here’s Professor Soll’s argument:

“There are significant savings to be had by improving efficiency by even two or three miles per gallon on inefficient cars, but because we communicate in miles per gallon, that savings is not immediately evident to consumers.”

I’m convinced.