I’m writing longer blog posts than I used to. On my main blog they rarely clock in at under 500 words now, and I’ve seen an increasing number creep over the 1,000 word mark. I thought I’d have a look at the three blogs I write on and do a word count for the month of March. It’s the 29th today, so that means I’ve got a couple of posts to go but the ones in draft have been included so I figure that should sort itself out.
The results are:
Daddacool 7,559 words across 12 posts
Kids Do Retro 6,223 words across 5 posts
Do it Anyway 1,937 words across 2 posts
That brings it in total to 15,719 words across 19 blog posts, averaging a little over 825 words per post. And my parenting blog actually drags the average down too- without it I’m averaging 1,165 words a post.
On the one hand, a 16,000 odd word output per month on top of a full time job isn’t bad by any stretch of the imagination, on the other hand I worry about my lack of self editing and focus.
To be fair, my retro gaming project I’m doing with Sam, our 8 year old, does lend itself to the longer post quite nicely. Each post starts with details about a game I played back in the dim and distant past, and a bit about my circumstances at the time, before going on to a paraphrase of the conversation between Sam and me while we play it for anything up to an hour. Initially I was going to transcribe our actual conversation verbatim but I found Sam was too aware of the dictaphone, so I now just scribble notes as we’re playing, and make sure I get the key “Sam-isms” verbatim. It generally works out as about 400 words on the context and 800 words playing the game.
Do it Anyway is also home to long form posts, rants mostly, about various aspects of blogging and social media, as well as tech reviews and commentary. The posts usually end up as long as they are as I like to qualify and explain each statement I make so there is little or no room for misinterpretation. Not that I always succeed of course, I often fail in an impressive manner. Still, I’m averaging about 1,000 words a post here too, which is probably excessive.
630 words per post on my parent blog is better but still a little excessive in the context of parent blogs.
And then there is the matter of the time I’ve spent writing it all. I am a quick writer, I couldn’t comment on my words per minute typing speed and that’s unlikely to wow anyone but I’m definitely not one of these sorts who agonises over a blog post for three or four hours. A 500-600 word post will generally take me approximately half an hour to actually write but there might be additional thinking time on top of that. Writing time of maybe 16-20 hours, add in about 10 for playing the retro games, and another 8-20 for researching and/or attending events, that’s 50 hours at the top end and 32 at the bottom end. That’s a lot of time, and probably explains why I’m not past series one on House of Cards just yet. Ironic, given I started blogging as a way of getting out of the habit of sitting in front of the telly and passively consuming all the time!
