The median word count for a book is about 64,000 words. Moby Dick has 212,000 words. The NIV Bible has 728,000 works. This blog? Over ONE MILLION WORDS. Granted, the vast majority of those million words are not worth much, but I guess there’s something to be said for quantity over quality.
Microsoft Word can calculate the reading level of your text using the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level formula. I ran that for each year of the blog and the average is somewhere between 6 and 7. I found a few sites that recommended targeting a 7th grade reading level for general audiences so I guess I’m a little below that. The reading level is based on the average length of a sentence and the average number of syllables per word. You can see that it has been increasing over the years, and since I’m a data scientist now, I’ll include the R-squared value on the trendline.
There should probably be some sort of prize for those of you who have been reading all this stuff since the beginning. A million words. That’s a lot of time. The average adult reads 300 words per minute. That’s 55 hours of your life devoted just to reading this website. That’s a lot of time, but it’s actually quite a bit less than I expected it to be when I started doing the math. So meh, cancel the prize. You only wasted two and a half days over the past 12.5 years.
Every time I do one of these posts looking back at the volume of text I’ve accumulated, I’m left wondering about when I’ll eventually stop writing. I don’t know the answer to that, but I do know when this post will come to an abrupt end.