How long is too long? Not long enough? Just right? (updated) by Karen Suhaka.
From the post:
A little frivolous confection for your holiday enjoyment: comparing how long bills are in different states. Thanks to Rich for a lovely job on the maps, as usual.
As a first comment, the average word length across the country of words in bills is 6.16 letters, vs about 5 letters in common writing. Given the technical language, one would certainly expect words to be longer on average, and 20% longer seems reasonable. But really I wanted to compare how long bills were, in word count, not in letter count. To start with, let’s simply look at the average length length of bills (in words) by state. I was quite surprised by the variation between states. Ohio bills are, on average, longer then bills in Tennessee, by almost 500 words!
Interesting visualization of the word length of legislation, state by state in the United States.
I suspect your observations about word length and states will be more pointed than mine.