Does Word Count Affect Your Writing Skill?
By: Dr John Anne | Posted: 30th May 2007
Article writers on the net are very specific about the number of words their articles contain. Naturally this should be so, because their employers also pay them on the basis of the number of words in their articles. Consequently, the writer becomes so much aware of the word count that the entire buildup of the article revolves around that number. This is a very unhealthy writing practice, since it diverts the attention from the quality of the matter to the quantity of the matter.
Actually, setting the correct word count is the responsibility of the website owners rather than the writers. The writers will only do as their employees say. Selection of a proper measure for the word count is very important in shaping a good article. Your article will become redundant if the word count is either too less or too much.
Imagine you have to write an article with the keyword ‘All You Need to Know about Education in Atlanta’. Even before beginning this article, you will know that it is an impossible feat to achieve. You cannot say all that is needed to be known in one article, which could be about 400-600 words. What you write in that much word count would not even begin to scrape the bottom of the barrel. Instead, you could tackle aspects one-by-one and make several articles. If an eager visitor to your site opens the article ‘All You Need to Know about Education in Atlanta’, then most certainly they will be displeased with the limited scope of the article. They would be so dissatisfied that they might never visit your site again.
At the same time, if the word count is too much, then it could simply put off the reader. Visitors to websites always look out for specific information. Even if a person is looking out for diabetes, they will want to know about specific things like causes, symptoms, treatments, alternative therapies, etc. Nobody wants everything at one go. So, split your winding article into smaller articles that are more specific, like ‘Causes of Diabetes’, ‘Alternative Therapies for Diabetes’, etc. This would really work in a much better way.
One more painful aspect seen in articles over the net is that writers write the same thing over and over again in different words. Obviously they do so to increase the bulk of the article, i.e. the word count. Reiterating facts could make your article larger, but what’s the point? The readers would be bored and even feel cheated. Instead of writing the same thing over and over again, research for new points from other websites, and include them in your article. Put in your own observations about facts. Readers would enjoy reading them. If you have mentioned some statistics in your article, then write a paragraph explaining how that trend would project in the future and what would be the economical and social repercussions, etc. If you are writing a medical article, then you could research some more facts and write to come to your word count.
If you really need to put in stuff to make your word count and are not getting what to write, then you can repeat some important information, but from a new perspective. Suppose you have already written ‘More than 25% of people in the state of X die from cancers each year’, then in a later paragraph you can mention ‘Despite a quarter of the population of X succumbing to cancers each year…’ and continue the sentence with a new point. In this way you are using half the information you have already given and writing something new at the same time. However, this is not good writing practice and must be used only as a last resort.
The word count is slowly becoming a parameter of judging writing skills, and that is an extremely distressing fact. Just think the condition of the world if Shakespeare had to write his plays sticking to a word count! But there are ways of expressing yourself even within such limitations. After all, isn’t that what the creativity of a writer is all about?
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Tags: scope, word count, diabetes, education, article writers, alternative therapies, bottom of the barrel, impossible feat, causes of diabetes