We began by looking at writers’ diction: whether the words used by MFA writers are noticeably different than those of their non-MFA counterparts. Using a process known as machine learning, we first taught a computer to recognize the words that are unique to each of our groups and then asked it to guess whether a novel (that it hasn’t seen before) was written by someone with an MFA. When we did this, the computer was successful only about 67 percent of the time at guessing correctly. You don’t need a degree in statistics to know this isn’t very good—you can be right 50 percent of the time just by accident. To put this number in context, with the same procedure we can predict bestselling novels about 82 percent of the time or whether a novel is a mystery or romance 85 percent and 95 percent of the time, respectively.

Nevertheless, there are some words that are different, but given that we’re talking about over 200,000 unique words, this is hardly surprising. For example, MFA novels tend to focus more on lawns, lakes, counters, stomachs, and wrists. They prefer names like Ruth, Pete, Bobby, Charlotte, and Pearl (while non-MFA novels seem to like Anna, Tom, John, and Bill). But on the whole, these distinctions look pretty meaningless; the words that appear more often in MFA novels don’t seem to be related to each other in a significant way. To test whether this was the case, we used a method called topic modeling that examines themes instead of individual words. And while MFA novels do tend to slightly favor certain themes like “family” or “home,” overall there’s no predictable way these topics appear with any regularity in novels written by creative writing graduates more than other people who write novels. To sum up: So far, no real difference between MFA and non-MFA works.

How about style? Surely, we thought, there should be some stylistic differences between these novels. The way writers put their words in order, that special MFA voice, should be detectable at some level. As one brochure has it, the goal of the adjunct faculty of an MFA program is to “work closely with their students to help them develop their own voices, styles, and form.” Presumably upon graduation those voices should be discernibly different than what’s already out there on the market. However, taking syntax as a measure of style—if we see style as the way writers sequence their words, the way they put their sentences together—we saw little difference between the two groups. MFA novels tend to use pairs of adjectives or adverbs less often, or avoid the more straightforward structure of a noun followed by a verb in the present tense. But other than that, there’s nothing detectably unique about the so-called “MFA style.”

So far, nothing. No real distinctions at the level of language, themes, or even syntax. When we went further to test whether the way writers constructed their characters was any different, once again nothing significant showed up. It was extremely difficult to separate the MFA and non-MFA writing groups in any meaningful way. If these results seem unbelievable, we shared this feeling as we carried out our tests. Our starting point was that there must be some mark of distinction. Why else were critics like Elif Batuman saying things like “the creative writing program has exercised the single most determining influence on postwar American literary production”? Why else were people paying for these schools?