Forum: Author Hangout

Multiply the kB with 175 and you come very close to the word count.

That is correct; the answer will be very close.

175 words/KB equates to about 5.7 characters per word.

It's remarkable how narrow the range is for average characters per word in English. In my experience:
* Anything which gets down as low as about 5.2 will be "baby talk" which nobody would want to read.
* The only example I've seen above 6.0 is a draft I wrote including invented words such as 'hyperflicatives', and I will go first, which nobody would want to read.

The approximate figures stated in reviews appear to be based on a multiplier of 189.6.

I just did a quick calculation using 10 stories of various lengths and different authors. The figures I got were all closest to 175 so that's what I suggested. (all figures were between 173 and a single high at 184).

I went to finestories looking for examples which might be near the top and bottom of the range for average characters (including spaces) per word.

There was no Hemingway so I tried Lewis Carroll as an example of a low average. His average of 5.3 was about what I expected.

I tried Bronte, Chekhov, and Dumas as possibles for having high averages. They were all between 5.4 and 5.6, a bit lower than I expected, although I was sure I wouldn't find anything above 6.0.

It has occurred to me that modern writers are more inclined to use contractions than classic authors. More frequent contractions will push up averages a bit.

I am not sure, but I think the storage sizes shown on SOL have very little wasted space.

My conclusion is you are both right: there would be very few stories on SOL which don't have words per KB in the range of 170-190. I expect I'd consider any that were intolerable to read, either for being too simplistic or too pretentious.

I am not sure, but I think the storage sizes shown on SOL have very little wasted space.

My conclusion is you are both right: there would be very few stories on SOL which don't have words per KB in the range of 170-190.

What I used was the sizes and word counts of stories in my own converted library. I count both without any 'wasted space', i.e. I just count the story text part of a html file, not the header and footer markup. The left over markup in the story part of the html file is very little, mostly p tags but those do increase the word size a little because the are mostly 'attached' to the first or last word of a sentence. On the other hand those same tags increase the kB size a little so that evens out I think. There might be a more significant difference between the use of kB (decimal) and KB (binary). For example a story is listed as 2971 KB on SOL where I have calculated it as 2951 kB. Converting 2971 KB to kB gives 3042 kB. Using both sizes with the word count I have it's 175 (SOL) vs 181 (my lib). Still, 181 is higher then the average between most stories I sampled. There might still be a difference in how the SOL size is calculated and how I do it but the figures remain pretty close. I must say that my own size calculation is very accurate: just the text part of each chapter and not including the index. So it's a very clean number for just the story text. Since the numbers remain close to those on SOL I agree that the displayed sizes on SOL are very accurate too.

The be totally complete: the average word size in my example story is 5.51. I never thought about it as being a number that would usable as an indication for complexity but now I understand that it indeed is.

I never thought about it as being a number that would usable as an indication for complexity but now I understand that it indeed is.

It is something I often measure before starting my first detailed review of an author's writing. I usually measure average words per sentence too and find which sentences and paragraphs have the greatest number of words.

There is a standard measure for the complexity of writing. IIRC, it multiplies the average syllables per word and the average words per sentence.

There is a standard measure for the complexity of writing. IIRC, it multiplies the average syllables per word and the average words per sentence.

One of the processor programs I use, I think MS Weird, has a feature that gives this Flesch-someone. It scores much of my stuff as 4th-grade or lower. I hope to hell no fourth graders are reading much of that stuff. It also doesn't count the difficulties of words; my vocabulary has brought some complaints.

(Do any of you think that 'rictus' is a hard word?)

Do any of you think that 'rictus' is a hard word?

Hold on. I want to check whether it is a word before answering that.

Boyds face set in a rictus grimace, as his abdominal rectus strained to push the excrement from his rectum.

There's an aforementioned context example.

'rictus'

Ric (or Rick) for a character's first name is fairly easy. A last name of Tus is a little less common, maybe the "k" was left off, I can think of an author that used Tusk as the last name for a character. Rict US probably is Strict US, talking about immigration policies.

Multiply the kB with 175 and you come very close to the word count.

Depending on how fast you read that should work out to roughly 1 to 1.5 kB per minute. (Reading 175 to 250 wpm)
So 60kB to 90kB per hour based on my quick, dirty and possibly inaccurate calculation.

(Reading 175 to 250 wpm)

I think that is about the average of typical readers in the community.

I'd expect average speeds of regular SOL readers to be a bit faster. There are some who read at speeds up near a thousand words per minute.

It also depends on what format the story is in.
I just downloaded the same story as a .txt and as a epub. files

For the size of the actual story text there should be no difference since the text is supposed to be the same in each format. But different formats have different markups so that would explain the difference. It would be too tedious to calculate the exact sizes and word count without any formatting for each format.