The New York Times

I read something the other day about the New York Times will be charging by the word.

I seem to remember that's the way Charles Dickens was paid. Which makes it hard to read Dickens' books, because it takes him four or five pages to describe every little thing.

I remember some of my own writing habits in school and college. They would say it needs to be 500 words or 3000 words, and you sit there wasting more time counting the words than anything else. (Now we have computers that tell how many words you've got, so it's easier.) I could write on and on about any subject, like right here, just blather on, clack it out, throw in lots and lots of qualifiers, all that. I used to enjoy seeing an occasional parody of student writing, like in National Lampoon.

But let's say the Times does charge by the word. What's to prevent them from giving us a bunch of small words and cheating us out of a better value with bigger words? They might have an article that quotes a guy who stutters all the time. And he'll have a quote with a lot of repeated words and we'll be paying extra right there. If I'm paying by the word, I want them to use a lot of very big words and leave out the extraneous words in a sentence that I can guess at. So fragments would be best. Like this, "If paying by word, I want lot big words, no extraneous, can guess'm." See what I did with that last word, just combine the "m" from "them" and so it's only one word but everyone knows what it means.