2015 Word Count

This past weekend I thought it would be worthwhile to collect a few basic statistics on my blogging from the year 2015. Specifically, I was curious to see how many words I published last year and the average word length of my posts. Unfortunately, Blogger does not seem to have a word counter amongst the analytical tools it offers, so I had to do this the hard way, by copying and pasting each post into a Word document, doing a word count there, and then logging the data into an Excel spreadsheet, from which I could get the statistics I was seeking. This is what I came up with:

In 2015 I published 67 posts, with a total of 51,508 words. I know that's rather small compared to a lot of people, but it's quite an achievement for me. The average length of a post was 769 words. Granted, the average is skewed by several of the longer Europe 2015 posts. I would guess that the average for non-Europe posts was closer to 250. Below are the six longest posts from 2015, which were all the ones that came out to longer than 2,000 words. No surprise, five of them are Europe-related.

1. Venice: Dream's End  -  2,842 words
2. Siena: The Battle of Tuscany  -  2,200 words
3. Zagreb: Stone and Water  -  2,153 words
4. Remembering Big O  -  2,133 words
5. Paris: The Three Day Campaign  -  2,097 words
6. Cinque Terre: Ascension  -  2,067 words

I had known that the Venice post was the longest of the year, but I didn't realize just how far ahead it was of all the others. Whereas the other five are all close to each other in the low 2,000s, the Venice post came close to nearing the 3,000 word mark.

Looking forward to 2016's writings, I think I'll end up doing this exercise again, though hopefully I'll have found an easier way to do it by then.