These days many people are obsessed with their metrics, they count steps, calories, sleep down to the minutes. One thing that most people don't track is their communication rate.
I send approximately 50-100 emails per day. That's a lot of communication and it doesn't include texts (increasingly a commonplace form of workplace interaction), social media, blog posts, and intraoffice and interoffice chats.
I tend naturally to spare prose which is a blessing for writing instructions (although a curse in college when term papers had word or page counts). It's my goal to convey the message with as few words as possible. At times I dispense with the salutation and closing, those old ghosts from the days of form letters.
Am I being abrupt or succinct? I suppose it depends on the audience. I've noticed an interesting trend in email, the longer the email, generally the less confidence the person has in their position. The more complicated the explanation, the less truth in it. The more someone is frustrated with me, the longer the email gets. Conversely, I've noticed in myself, the less patience I have for a person, the shorter my email.
In social media, brevity is rarely an issue. It's either enforced, as in Twitter, or merely encouraged. Increasingly many blog posts are often written that way, in sentences rather than paragraphs. I'm less sanguine on that change. I still delight in the utility of a multi-sentence paragraph and am lovingly mocked for my penchant for long titles. However blog posts that are under 500 words and use subtitles, bullet points, and sentence paragraphs tend to stronger social pickup. Spreadability continues to be a leading metric in the social space.
Does an average words per day or words per email metric have value in determining the potency of your communication? Like any metric, once you've got a baseline it's fun to experiment and see what the results are.