Fandango’s question this week is on a favourite subject of many bloggers, length of posts.

Do you have a preference with respect to the length of blog posts you read? Does the number of words in a post affect how you read it or even if you will read it? What is your average post length?

https://fivedotoh.com/2022/07/20/fandangos-provocative-question-174/

This time we’re talking more about the type of posts we prefer to read rather than the posts we write. I have to say that when I open a post by a fellow blogger the word count is not the first thing I think about. Of course I know the style of particular bloggers that I follow. I know whose posts will be mostly photos, which ones will be short, Fandango himself is usually Mr Brevity; some bloggers will post mostly photos and/or art, while others I know will have average to long posts. I’m usually more drawn to read a post by the subject matter than the word count. However, I do sometimes leave a post that I know will be long to read at my leisure rather than racing through it in the morning when I first check to see what you’ve all been doing while I was asleep.

There are some posts that are a bit long even for me though. These are usually posts of a political nature or something educational but where the writer is taking too long to get to the point or the point is buried amongst a lot of detail. I know I should read every word but sometimes I admit I just skim. This is not usually the case with the bloggers I follow but other random posts or articles that look interesting to begin with.

My average word count per post on this blog is 349. I think that I normally write much more than that. I used to, when I was first blogging, check my word count before I published a post. I don’t now but I’m probably between 500-800 words for an opinion type post. However, a lot of my posts are for photo challenges and for those I don’t write a lot so that probably brings the total down.