Calmness-to-word-count Ratio
Someone on a writing forum confessed a lack of knowledge concerning this ratio. To give some background, she had claimed to be calm and yet she had written some 11,000 or so tension-filled words in a rambling all-over-the-place post trying to convince me that she was calm and hadn't a care in the world. So I put together the concise but informative response below:
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Ah, calmness-to-word-count ratio...I've read something from a medical journal not too long ago...somewhere...
Well, I'll just paraphrase from what I can recall may or may not have been in what may or may not have been a medical journal:
"We here at the Doctors For Larger Co-Pays Clinic believe that anger and stress are our biggest money-makers. No, wait! That is to say they are our biggest concern.
"We therefore wanted to conduct an extremely complicated and costly research study, paid for by some pharmaceutical company whose name escapes us. Unfortunately all the good, interesting, easily-plagiarizable stress studies have already been done or are too recent.
"So we threw a dart at a dictionary and it landed on 'worms'. We spent weeks and millions of dollars on calmness-to-worms ratios, took a week off in the French Alps, and decided on 'words' instead, which is fairly close to 'worms' in the dictionary.
"We then spent an entire afternoon reading words to our fourteen year old basset hound and found out that, after reading--without pausing, mind you--that Sir Snoresalot raised his head after seventy-nine words were read. A breakthrough!
"After another week in the war-torn region of Zurich, Switzerland, we found that we didn't feel like reading any more. But after further, considerable rest in a villa in Milan, we were able to resume our study.
"Sir Snoresalot passed away, sadly, but we duct-taped the neighbor girl next door to a fence post and read to her. She cried the whole time but got very loud after 283 words.
"Exhausted, we spent three weeks on an island on the Great Barrier Reef near Australia, where our yacht ran aground.
"Our study was complete. We have proven, without a shred of doubt, that blood pressure rises for every 283 words read. And also that money does buy happiness."
I think you'll find this is unshakeable testimony and I'd provide you with the link to the web site, if there was one.
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Ah, calmness-to-word-count ratio...I've read something from a medical journal not too long ago...somewhere...
Well, I'll just paraphrase from what I can recall may or may not have been in what may or may not have been a medical journal:
"We here at the Doctors For Larger Co-Pays Clinic believe that anger and stress are our biggest money-makers. No, wait! That is to say they are our biggest concern.
"We therefore wanted to conduct an extremely complicated and costly research study, paid for by some pharmaceutical company whose name escapes us. Unfortunately all the good, interesting, easily-plagiarizable stress studies have already been done or are too recent.
"So we threw a dart at a dictionary and it landed on 'worms'. We spent weeks and millions of dollars on calmness-to-worms ratios, took a week off in the French Alps, and decided on 'words' instead, which is fairly close to 'worms' in the dictionary.
"We then spent an entire afternoon reading words to our fourteen year old basset hound and found out that, after reading--without pausing, mind you--that Sir Snoresalot raised his head after seventy-nine words were read. A breakthrough!
"After another week in the war-torn region of Zurich, Switzerland, we found that we didn't feel like reading any more. But after further, considerable rest in a villa in Milan, we were able to resume our study.
"Sir Snoresalot passed away, sadly, but we duct-taped the neighbor girl next door to a fence post and read to her. She cried the whole time but got very loud after 283 words.
"Exhausted, we spent three weeks on an island on the Great Barrier Reef near Australia, where our yacht ran aground.
"Our study was complete. We have proven, without a shred of doubt, that blood pressure rises for every 283 words read. And also that money does buy happiness."
I think you'll find this is unshakeable testimony and I'd provide you with the link to the web site, if there was one.
posted by JohnR at
11:28 AM
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