By Mia Hanuska
This year marks my second year writing for The Shield (not counting my two articles I wrote freshman year), and while some people paint or sing to express themselves, I write. I love to write, and recently, I’ve been wondering just how much I’ve really written for The Shield. I mean, I can tell that I’ve been writing more and more each issue—last issue I wrote a whopping nine articles—but what’s the breakdown? What pages do I write the most for?
So of course I did the only logical thing: I made a spreadsheet. I manually inputted each article, the word count, what page and what issue I wrote it for, and if I collaborated with someone else to write it. Then, after some time figuring out Google Sheets, I made some absolutely stunning graphs with the data. Here are my stats:
Article Count: 86
Total Word Count: 43183
The fewest number of words I have written was my first issue sophomore year (technically issue 2), where I wrote 887 words. My second-most was the seventh issue of that school year, with 5227 words, and my most words written per issue is this issue, with a whopping 6316.
The category “Specialty” refers to any page that was special for the issue—for example, the ‘25 or Time Periods pages this issue—so it makes sense that it has the most words. You might notice some pages are missing; there are some pages I simply just don’t enjoy writing for. Following up, my favorite is Op/Ed, where I typically write around 800 heavily researched words. I’d consider my Op/Eds my best work, and they’re the ones I love the most. I’m glad they’re so high! Speaking of what pages I write a lot for…
Surprisingly I have written 11.6% of my articles for WHS News…? I didn’t realize I wrote so many articles for it, but with all the robotics articles I’ve written, I suppose it’s not necessarily surprising.
I began writing for The Shield with a mere four articles, and now find myself writing 7-9 articles per issue!
Lastly, I tracked how many articles I wrote with other people. Truthfully, I prefer to write alone, as I’m very picky about my writing style. When I do collaborate, it’s typically with my fellow writers Emi Gruender, with whom I have a column on the entertainment page, “Groovy Movies,” or Kathryn Tanaka.