Copying a Veteran Daily Blogger

Looking at word count and number of sentences per paragraph

What does it take to produce a successful daily blog year after year? How about decade after decade? I don’t know, but we might look to Arnold Kling for clues. Arnold’s web-based essays stretch all the way back to 1997. That’s dial-up model era for you Gen Zers. Arnold was one of the original bloggers at Econlog, with his oldest articles on that site dating back to the earliest days of the Iraq War. It looks like he’s been posting almost daily since then. He currently delivers a daily newsletter to 8400 subscribers at In My Tribe.

I was curious how my writing stacks up against a successful, veteran blogger like Kling so I asked ChatGPT to count and calculate various parameters in 20 of Arnold Kling’s most recent essay-style blog posts. Such metrics as word count, number of paragraphs, words per sentence, etc. These parameters arguably aren’t the most important characteristics of being a good writer, but they are one of the easiest to quantify.

Arnold generally has two kinds of posts:

1. The essay-style posts analyzed below;

2. And his Links to Consider posts in which he provides recommended reading and commentary on other writers’ posts.

Both kinds of posts are very popular, but here I look only at the first kind.

Here’s my ChatCPT prompt.¹

I'm going to give you an essay. Please count the number of words in the essay. Please count the number of paragraphs in the essay. Please count the number of sentences in the essay. Please calculate the average number of words in each sentence. Please calculate the average number of sentences in each paragraph.   Are you ready?

And here are the results. How do your posts compare?

Arnold consistently delivers between 500 and 1500 words per post, with an average of approximately 900 words.

Arnold’s writing is clear and concise. He averages 3 sentences per paragraph and 20 words per sentence. Arnold doesn’t use a lot of hyphens, semicolons or colons. He generally sticks with commas and periods, so his sentences are easy to read. His prose isn’t chock-full of links; he goes rather sparingly with those. His posts typically lack pictures.

His posts typically consists of 16 paragraphs per post, ranging from a low of 8 to a high of 30.² Here we see that his sentence-to-paragraph ratio tracks 3-to-1 pretty consistently.

That’s pretty much it for the quantitative side of these posts. In summary Kling consistently delivers:

• 900 word posts

• 3 sentences per paragraph

• 20 words per sentence

• 16 paragraphs per post

Ten of my most recent posts show the following:

• 1400 word posts

• 3 sentences per paragraph

• 18 words per sentence

• 27 paragraphs per post

So I would say my posts are probably too long for a daily blog, but of course it depends on what the goals, frequency and topics covered are.

How do your posts stack up?

Who are you favorite daily bloggers? Do your favorite Substack writers tend to write shorter pieces or longer pieces?

Any tips for writing shorter pieces? Advice to myself is to narrow the scope of my posts.

1. Then I simply cut and paste the blog post from Substack into ChatGPT, record the output by hand in a spreadsheet and repeat the process with 19 more of Kling’s recent Substack posts. How would you do it?

2. I note a couple of errors in ChatGPTs counts so don’t trust all of this data.