A word counter's least useful output is the word count. The number that shows up biggest is the one that matters least — the value is in the analysis underneath it: how long your sentences run, which words you lean on, how readable the whole thing actually is. So instead of describing what the tool measures, we pointed it at ourselves and reported what it found — including where it found a problem.
The corpus
We ran all 22 posts on this blog — 24,003 words across 1,084 sentences — through our own word counter. One writer, one blog, no cherry-picking: whatever the tool flagged, we kept.
We write long sentences
Average sentence length across the whole blog: 22.1 words. The common readability guideline is 15–20, so we run consistently over. And the average hides the tail — our worst post averaged 39.7 words a sentence, which reads as a wall of text no matter how carefully it's punctuated.
Long sentences aren't a sin; some ideas need the room. But drift is invisible without the number. You don't feel yourself creeping from 18 to 22 to 26 words a sentence over a year of writing — you just notice, eventually, that everything reads a little heavy. The counter makes the drift visible while you can still fix it.
Our crutch word wasn't on any list
The single most-overused word in the whole blog was "every" — 93 uses. It's not on a single "words to cut" list, because those lists are generic and crutch words are personal. Meanwhile the words those articles always name — very, really, just — barely appeared in our writing at all.
That's the whole argument for measuring your own text rather than running a canned checklist over it. A generic filler-word list can't know that you, specifically, reach for "every" when you mean "many." Counting your actual words can, and does.
The takeaway
Point the tool at your own writing first. The word count is trivia; the sentence-length distribution and your personal crutch words are the product. Fix the top one or two habits and every later post inherits the improvement — which is a far better return than obsessing over a target word count.
The word counter runs entirely in your browser — sentence and paragraph stats, reading time, keyword frequency, readability — with nothing uploaded. Run your last post through it and see what it says about you.
Originally published on LK Forge.
Top comments (1)
평균 22.1단어보다 최악의 글이 39.7단어까지 늘어났다는 꼬리 분포를 함께 보여준 점이 인상적입니다. 일반 금칙어 목록 대신 실제 글에서 “every” 93회를 찾아낸 사례도 개인별 편집 규칙이 왜 필요한지 잘 설명하네요. 다음 분석에서는 문장 길이와 이탈률·체류시간을 연결해도 흥미로울 것 같습니다.