I got curious.
I got to a’wondering about two things about this blog’s word counts. I realize that what follows is a somewhat meta post, but it’s winter and I have time to think about word counts.
My two questions are:
- How many words have I written in the 962 posts I’ve published here; and
- How many words are in the average comment here.
• Answering the first question was easy.
WordPress provides information on word count by post and by year. Looking at the chart featured at the bottom of this post you can see that I’ve written & published a total of 962 posts with a total word count of 282,612 words.
This averages overall to 294 words per post, although last year I got wordier averaging 360 words per post.
A digression… according to this article, A Word Count Guide for 18 Book Genres, Including Novels and Non-Fiction, 80,000 words is the ideal length for a novel. “If you’re working on a novel-length book, aim for 50,000 words at the very least — but it’s better to aim for 90,000. Editorial trimming is inevitable.”
Ergo, keeping the above rule of thumb in mind while applying it to my blog word count [282,612 divided by 90,000] you can see that in essence
I’VE WRITTEN THREE BOOKS.
• Answering the second question took more effort and required a few assumptions.
Because there’s no stinking way I’m going through all the comments on this blog to find the total comment word count, I made a few, shall we say, educated guesses.
Thus I decided that I’d only look at the comment word count on my 2021 blog posts AND that I’d only look at the comments made by the top recent commenters [according to WordPress] because I figure those people are a good representation of all commenters.
The top recent commenters are: Linda, LA, Dan, Nancy, Tara, and Kari. Go visit them and say “hi!”
To wit, there are 38 comments from these individuals with a total of 1616 words. This means that the average comment word count is 43 words.
Do what you will with this statistic; I was unable to find any articles written on the topic of comment word counts, so I don’t know how to interpret this number. Other than to say
THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO COMMENTS HERE.
Curiosity satisfied. The end.
Questions Of The Day
When you write do you keep track of your word count as you go along? Are you aiming for a specific number?
Did you know that the word *forsooth* is an archaic or humorous word meaning “indeed”?
Do you have any idea how I made the pretty text box featured near the top of this post? I hit some buttons and it happened, but I’ve no idea what I did.
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