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Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Word count

Today I downloaded a program called PractiCount & Invoice that's designed to generate statistical reports from any number of documents that you plug in. Its tagline reads "Word Count and line count software for Translators and Transcriptionists." It costs nearly $100 if you buy the business version, but I was only interested in the 15 day free trial so I could generate some word counts from the pages of EnidBlyton.net. I was so amazed by the program that I'd definitely recommend it to anyone looking for, er, word and line count software for translators and transcriptionists!

Anyway, I tweaked a few settings so it only counted words and not HTML tags, and then I double-checked a few results by manually copy-pasting sections into Word and using its own word count tool. The comparison between the two tools was startling, virtually identical results in all my tests. Copy-pasting everything into Word would take forever, hence the need for a speedier method — so, confident that PractiCount was using all its fingers and toes to count, I pressed ahead and started number crunching.

I now have some pretty good statistics that interest me no end (nerd that I am). I made sure to ignore common wording such as menu links across the top and down the left side; I only counted words within the actual body itself, including bold header titles and any illustration captions on the right. I excluded the non-Blyton section.

So, to summarize the results, EnidBlyton.net to date has:

So, all in all, that's something like 425,171 words throughout the entire site — getting on for half a million! If these numbers don't mean a lot to you, then consider them in terms of Enid Blyton books. 425,171 words is nine or ten Famous Five books, or the entire Secret Seven series. Harry Potter fans will nod knowingly when I say that the first (shortest) book was 76,944 words whereas the fifth (and longest) book was 257,045 words. That last statistic staggers me — the fact that it's quicker to read The Order of the Phoenix than all the content on my site!

A final note, then, to say that I probably produced around half the content myself, with the rest submitted by others in the form of messages, bloopers, "Talk About Blyton" items, various book reviews and articles, and the Round Robin novel.

A monumental and collaborative effort, then. Your help over the last few years has literally doubled the size of the site. Thank you!

This post has 1 comment

POSTED BY ROGOZ ON WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 9, 2008...

Another handy tool is the Gunning fog index & similar programs which calculate 'readability'. Available free on line. Famous Five comes in at 9 / 10 -- equivalent to Reader's Digest -- and above 'True Confessions' !!



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