In Alan Moore's Writing for Comics, Moore says that a comic panel has an average of 35 words. I had never thought about it before, so I started paying attention.
Reading over my old comics scripts, I realized how much I didn't know about the medium at the time. Just trying to read them out loud was a chore. They had to be rewritten, both to save space on the panel and to be more digestible. I have a pretty good internal rhythm, so I can feel when a panel has too much in it. I thought about what Moore said and I counted the rewritten lines. No panel had more than 15 words in it.
Later on, I was writing original scripts (rather than rewriting old ones) and noticed a new phenomenon while writing. Short lines felt good. Longer lines felt really heavy. They also felt increasingly boring. Right when I reached the point that I didn't want to spend the effort on reading or writing any more, I did a word count. It was always at the 15 word mark that it got to be cumbersome.
When I read comics, I do a word count. Good lines are under 15, usually under 10 words. Once they get to 15 words, they are a chore. They don't sound natural.
I wondered if this was a phenomenon of comics or of comic strips specifically. Then I thought about text books, newspapers, and English from the 1800's and before. All of those have sentences that comprise entire paragraphs. They are also unreadable. The 15 word rule definitely works for non-comics as well. The only difference is that the rule for comics is 15 words per panel and for others it is 15 words per sentence.
Bottom line: No thought needs more than 15 words. If a sentence has over 15 words, it can be shortened or split. A sentence can work with 21 words in it, but those words have to matter. Even still, it can probably be made into shorter, stronger sentences. Words can have major differences in length, but they generally average out. A sentence with too many big words will sound awful before word count matters.
Fact: Every sentence in this post with more than 15 words sucks. Some sentences with less than 15 words probably also sucked.
About Me
- Kevin Bahler
- I am a writer. A writer is one who writes. By the same logic, I am also a thinker, an observer, and a puzzle solver. I am a graduate from the State University of New York at Cortland with a degree in Professional Writing. The idea of the program is that one studies all three aspects of writing as a whole: Creative Writing, Technical Writing, and Rhetoric. The knowledge I have gained in those subjects is put to use in every aspect of my life. The worst thing a person can be is boring. I am most interested in people who can pique my interests. An example is people who can correctly use the word 'pique'.
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