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To Count or not to Count?

The measure I use to mark the amount of work I have done is number of words. Certainly, this is not the best metric to use but it is one that is easily quantifiable. I would love to be able to use some sort of formula to figure this out, perhaps attaching one value to the number of words and another value – some sort of sliding scale – to the quality of the writing.

I am thinking of some sort of equation like this:

Weffective = Nwords * Qsection

Where W is work done and Qsection is the numerical quality of the section being examined.

The ideal is not to simply churn out more words. That’s easy. I could hire a well-trained chicken to push keys on the laptop all day. The key is to have lots of words with a high quality density when strung together.

But then there’s the problem of how to measure quality, since it is really a subjective judgment. Different styles appeal to different people and even calculating grade levels or using “ease of reading” scales does not give a lot of information. Something that is easy to read, like Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, is not necessarily worse or better than something written on a very high level, such as the various writings of Umberto Eco.

Does anyone have an idea how to do something like this?

I don’t suppose I would adopt such a measure right off but I would love to see how someone else calculates it.

Until then, I will be going by quantity to measure my progress, knowing that I write at a certain level of quality on first pass. By the way, I recently passed 42,000 words, for what that means.

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 7th, 2007 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Book Progress, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “To Count or not to Count?”

  1. jonny goldstein Says:
    May 24th, 2007 at 12:17 pm

    I think going for quantity works. Let it sprout up willy nilly. Then you can go back and manicure it. At least that’s my approach to facial hair. Should work for writing too, right?

  2. admin Says:
    May 25th, 2007 at 2:32 pm

    I hear ya, Jonny. It’s like making an ice sculpture – something I know you are well-versed in.

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