How Many Words Should An Article Contain?

How Many Words Should An Article Contain?
By George Rusky,
August 2004

Have you ever thought of how you start reading a new article? I mean, what do you do first?
Look at a list of pre-things I’d like you to consider before reading articles.
So, what will you start with?
The title?
The author?
The subject?
The short contents of the article?

I, for one, always start with the title of the article. If it grabs my attention, I go to the author, and ...

1. If the writer is known and authoritative, read the article;
2. If un-known, immediately seek the information about the author. Suppose, from the information, it’s not clear about the writer’s expertise.
Then my next step is - the number of the words. If the number of words exceeds 350-450, most probably the article will be left without reading.
Why is that so?
The art of writing articles lies in the ability of an author to advertise her mastery, her business, her mastery to persuade the readers to single out her from her competition, to lead the reader to the Most Wanted Response, which is a click on the link to the article writer’s site, and only this tap of a reader’s point finger is worth writing an article.

Now, where does the above mentioned 350-450 number of words come from? Simple arithmetic:
The Title-8-10 words.
The Lead of the story, the most important paragraph -40-50 words.
The Body of the article, depending on the business may vary from 250 to 300 words.
The Ending may include not more then 50-60 words.

And now, probably, the most important part of the whole article: The information of the writer and her business, not more then 25-35 words.
So, let’s put these figures together:
a) minimum: 40+250+50+25=365
b) maximum: 50+300+60+35=445

These simple calculations surely do not reflect the whole spectrum of writers’ approaches, and only the authors exactly know what and how they want to write.
But, listen up!
The further the writer from tested and proven standards of business writing, the further is she from the Most Wanted Response.

P.S. This article serves as the illustration of the writer’s concept: The Title- 7words The Lead- 51words The Body-242words The Ending-50words The Info about the author-27 (The total number of words is-377)