If the aim is golf, it's probably best to keep #" ". If the aim is accuracy, we might get better results by using #"[^\w]+". Though that does nasty things to words like "it's".

Edit: Actually, we can also get rid of the 'reverse' by replacing (sort-by val) with (sort-by (comp - val)). Not going to be shorter in terms of character count, though we win on line count.