The classic advice on word count is always "write as much as you need to achieve your purpose," which is vague enough to drive everyone crazy -- though it nevertheless remains good advice.
The worst thing is to have young writers recreating great scenes and characters and dialog, feeling they need to drop most of that, and then producing listless reports. My most common response to a piece of writing is, "I want MORE." Here's a counter-intuitive thought: SNO posts can be as long as needed, even though the common wisdom is that everything online should be short. But isn't it true that we all have read some quite long pieces online?
It can also be helpful to consider how much time you believe readers will allocate to any particular piece. The average reading time (ART) for adults is about 200 words per minute. In my later advising career we morphed into classifying stories by ART. Then we could ask questions like, "Is this a two-minute story/post?" If yes, that translates to about 400 words. The classic newspaper column tends to come in at 800 words (four minutes ART) but that was simply the number of words that would fill one vertical column in a broadsheet newspaper. If a kid hands you an in-depth article running 2,000 words, that means most readers will need to devote 10 solid minutes to reading. I loved this approach, as it emphasized how our work would be consumed and the audience should always be our foremost concern.
I remember when the Portland Oregonian used to run ads claiming that reading the paper is "the best 15 minutes of your day." That seemed to be a recognition that most readers don't spend much time with the paper. I found it both realistic and depressing. We kept hoping to get 30-40 minutes or more of reading out of our print magazine, even if it was in smaller chunks of time. Thirty minutes of reading time amounts to about 6,000 words, but the magazine always contained multiples of that number.
Bottom line: if a piece of writing is compelling enough, readers will stick with it. At the first indication of the story running out of steam or losing the main narrative thread, readers check out.
Jack Kennedy
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