I learned long ago—I think doing high-school journalism—that 250-300 words is the limit for a letter to the editor, ~750 words is a good length for a typical article or op-ed, and 3k words is a feature article. In college and later grad school, I learned 4.5k as a typical term paper length, and I made the chapters in the two books I’ve written around 6k words. Obviously, academic papers and academic book chapters can be much longer than 6k words.
I’ve been approaching this from the point of view of “blog posts should generally be like typical newspaper articles or feature articles; a term paper or a book chapter as a blog post is usually too long.” But maybe I should think of feature article / term paper as the standard?
I think that the feature article and above (though empirically the standard here seems to be about 2k, rather than 3k) as the target for Main, and the op-ed and below for discussion, is a good split. I think that shorter articles can be worth it for Main, but the quality and relevance bars are higher (and they should be standalone).
This is useful.
I learned long ago—I think doing high-school journalism—that 250-300 words is the limit for a letter to the editor, ~750 words is a good length for a typical article or op-ed, and 3k words is a feature article. In college and later grad school, I learned 4.5k as a typical term paper length, and I made the chapters in the two books I’ve written around 6k words. Obviously, academic papers and academic book chapters can be much longer than 6k words.
I’ve been approaching this from the point of view of “blog posts should generally be like typical newspaper articles or feature articles; a term paper or a book chapter as a blog post is usually too long.” But maybe I should think of feature article / term paper as the standard?
I think that the feature article and above (though empirically the standard here seems to be about 2k, rather than 3k) as the target for Main, and the op-ed and below for discussion, is a good split. I think that shorter articles can be worth it for Main, but the quality and relevance bars are higher (and they should be standalone).
Thanks. I will follow this rule in the future.