Next Life in the Afternoon

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:

W_effective = N_words * Q_section
Where W is work done and Q_section 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.

Technorati Tags: work, metric, formula, quality, writing, equation, well-trained chicken, judgment, Ernest Hemingway, Umberto Eco, quantity

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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.