Education: Adjectives v. Verbs

Psychologists, who breathe statistics as a salamander breathes fire, love to count things. They count and classify words to determine what books children should read, what children's classics should be rewritten, how intelligent grown-up readers are. Last week a Chicago psychologist came up with a word-counting formula for measuring not readers but writers. Goateed, Russian-born Dr. David Pablo Boder, head of the psychology department at Lewis Institute (a technical school) and director of its Psychological Museum, called his formula the Adjective-Verb Quotient.

Not to be confused with the I. Q. (intelligence quotient), the A. V. Q. is a measure of the ratio...

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