So, I was struck with the idea just the other day about how many words I've written (by hand or typed) my whole life. Now, I know this is not possible to know, but adding up all the word documents I have from the past 3 or 4 years is. So, I did it. It took a couple hours (and a few frustrating moments with Word in particular) as well as three whole Word documents to hold all the bits of information, but finally, I reached my overall estimate. Word decided to freak out and erase everything at around page 900, so I had to find out another way to calculate my overall word count as opposed to cramming all the words into one doc, since apparently the amount overwhelmed Word. And I wanted it to be as accurate as possible, although I understand without precision (which I didn't have) there are bound to be errors. However, I do believe the my answer is close enough to the truth. Just for a visual, I've included the amount of pages as well, although I know for a fact there are spaces and such.
First doc: 459,203 words (875 pages)
Second: 104,595 words (429 pages)
Third: 44,547 words (117 pages)
Which gives me a total of: 608,345 words (and 1,421 pages)
In the past 3-4 years, based off of what I've written and saved, I've written around 608,345 words. This number consists of novels - finished and otherwise - school projects (essays, research papers, etc.) and miscellaneous writing stuffs. My (rough) finished novels alone take up 205,733 words (29.57%) of that total.
....
Never would I have imagined the total reaching this high in just four years.
Anyway, time for the history of this endeavor. In my Faith and Reason class on Friday, my teacher mentioned something about an average word count for college-aged people that had compiled throughout their lifetime. Now, I can't exactly remember the number* he came up with, but I keep thinking it was somewhere in the 100,000's. Maybe in the 150,000-200,000 range somewhere. (I'm not entirely sure where he'd get such information, but I trust him not to just pull a number off the top of his head.) Regardless, I knew as soon as he'd said the number that I had most likely surpassed it, being a writer and all. Thus, this planted the seed of thought that grew into the desire to attempt to figure out how many possible words I've written in even just the past couple years. And there you go. This is my conclusion.
Phew.
To go even further into calculating this, I could try to figure out what the average word-per-day count is. Let's say roughly 4 years.
365 days x 4 years = 1,460 days
608,345 words / 1,460 days = 416.674658 words per day
Wow.
It can only go up from here! :D
Now I feel inspired to write more.
Ta~
V
*EDIT: I talked to him today about it - it was a calculation of hours someone might have spent writing and that number of hours would put them at a certain level from complete novice to professional writer. How different I translated that, eh? From hours into word count. Perhaps that's just the trigger I needed anyway. Well, whichever. Still intriguing (:
