How does literary style evolve? Surprisingly,【C1】______ lie in words with seemingly little meaning, such as "to" and "that". By analysing【C2】______writers use such "content-free" words, Daniel Rockmore and colleagues at Dartmouth College in Hanover were able to conduct the first, large-scale style analysis of literature. Content-free words are【C3】______of writing style, Rockmore says. While two authors might use the【C4】______content words to describe a similar event, they will use content-free words to【C5】______their content words in a different way. Using the Project Gutenberg digital library, Rockmore"s team analysed 7733 English language works written since 1550, 【C6】______how often and in what【C7】______content-free words appeared. As you might expect, they found that writers were 【C8】______influenced by their predecessors. They also found that as the number of literature works grew, the influence of older works【C9】______. Authors in the【C10】______periods wrote in a very similar way to one another, the researchers found, probably because they all read the same【C11】______body of literature. But approaching the modern era,【C12】______more people were writing and more works were【C13】______ from many eras and numerous styles, authors" styles were still very similar to those of their【C14】______contemporaries. "It"s as if they find dialects in time," says Alex Bentley. "Content is what makes us【C15】______, but content-free words put us in different【C16】______." 【C17】______writers should be most influenced by their contemporaries【C18】______the great works of the past is interesting, Rockmore says, because it challenges the【C19】______of "classic" literature. When it comes to style 【C20】______, perhaps we aren"t so strongly influenced by the classics after all.