I use a lot of words.<\/p>\n
At least, that’s what I’m told<\/i>.<\/p>\n
See, I’m not conscious of the number of words I use. Or rather, the number of words I write<\/i>. Because they’re just words<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Which is probably why I’m not a poet. I lack the… precision<\/i> of a poet.<\/p>\n
And anyway. Poetry doesn’t interest me a whole lot. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
But what brings this observation about? That I use a lot of words?<\/p>\n
A friend e-mailed me last night. I’d not talked to her recently, and she was touching base, just seeing how things were.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t a long e-mail. Maybe two hundred words.<\/p>\n
I dashed off a reply. About forty minutes work; I was listening to an all-covers version of Sgt Pepper<\/i>, and when I hit “A Day in the Life” I knew I had to draw things to a close.<\/p>\n
I measure my writing time by the length of CDs. If the CD is coming to an end, then I need to wrap things up. It’s why I can’t write to “shuffle” — I know the order the tracks go in, and depending on the track, I know how close I am to the end.<\/p>\n
Writing as a sprint. And who cares about hurdles? \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
My reply — which isn’t finished, actually, as I said I would write more on one subject in particular — ran two thousand words.<\/p>\n
That’s not a particularly fast pace, by the way. That’s fifty words a minute. I can<\/i> type faster than that. Like in the 120 wpm range.<\/p>\n
Produce clean text to requirements on a timely basis. That’s a good rule to live by.<\/p>\n
Not really my point here, though.<\/p>\n
I’ve heard it said that the brain works at 75 words a minute. I don’t know if that’s true or not. I sometimes think that my brain doesn’t work with what are exactly words<\/i>. And quantifying the unquantifiable isn’t something I’m inclined to do.<\/p>\n
So I wrote this e-mail. And I wrote it quickly. And I didn’t even think<\/i> about it. Just the clatter of keys, and there it was<\/i>.<\/p>\n
And it used a lot of words.<\/p>\n
I sometimes think that people don’t know quite how to respond to me. Because I do<\/i> use a lot of words. I think things through, and sometimes my thought process is completely transparent as I work through my thoughts. I castigated someone on a bulletin board last week, and his response was that his faux pas<\/i> didn’t require an essay in reply. But of course<\/i> it did. I had an argument to make, and I wanted to make it.<\/p>\n
Which takes words.<\/p>\n
There’s half a million words here, across seventeen hundred posts. And I’m not even trying<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Half a million words.<\/p>\n
That is<\/i> a lot of words. \ud83d\ude06<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I use a lot of words. At least, that’s what I’m told. See, I’m not conscious of the number of words I use. Or rather, the number of words I write. Because they’re just words. Which is probably why I’m not a poet. I lack the… precision of a poet. And anyway. Poetry doesn’t interestContinue reading “On Quantities of Words”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[114],"tags":[547,4102],"class_list":["post-1726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asides","tag-word","tag-writing","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1726\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}