By Mia Hanuska
Now, I love to write. It’s not a secret that I’m pretty much always planning, researching, or drafting articles for The Shield. And it’s not just because I write a lot of articles, but because each one takes hours of behind the scenes work—scouring Google Scholar for papers, editing, and more.
Since 2024, I have kept a spreadsheet of my article statistics—title, word count, page, if I wrote it with someone—and update it each issue. Last year I found out I had written a 86 articles with a total of 43,183 words in both 2023 and 2024 combined, but what about 2025?
Total Word Count: 46,215
Total Article Count: 79
This year, I’ve written 15 more articles than I did last year, and wrote nearly 11,000 more words. This year’s word count is:
- Equal to nearly 107 pages of a 1.5 spaced Google Doc, which, printed and laid out, would be over 98 feet long, which is about 27% of a football field
- About 16,000 words more than of both Of Mice and Men and Animal Farm
- Around 23,000 M&Ms, if you were to print words on them
For word count per issue, the most words I’ve written is this issue (issue 5, January) with a record 9,733 words, the most words I’ve ever written for one issue in my three years writing for The Shield. The fewest words was issue 9 (June) with a mere 1,060 words because its articles are written at the same time as issue 1 for the next school year (August). Plus, with AP tests and finals, time tends to get scarce around that time of year.
Unsurprisingly, I’ve written the most words for “specialty” pages. The “specialty” category is for all pages that are only for one issue—think Back to School (issue 1), Halloween (issue 3), and ‘26 (issue 5). Since all of the pages are grouped into one category, the word count for them is always incredibly high (14,594 words). Also somewhat surprising is that my second highest category is Entertainment—I would’ve expected Op/Ed but after reviewing the lengths of the Groovy Movies articles, it checks out.
Similarly, the amount of articles I’ve written per page generally aligns with the previous graph of word count. I’ve written the most “specialty” articles, 23, and then poems, 9. Interestingly, I have written an equal amount of entertainment, fun and games, fashion, and eats articles this year, with 6 each!
Now for probably my craziest stat: articles per issue. I’m peaking at an insane 13 articles this issue (issue 5, January), and the March issue was my second highest with 12. For those unaware, we write and edit each issue’s articles in around 3 weeks, so for 13 articles, that’s an average of over 4 articles per week, or around 3,000 words per week (plus more for brainstorming and researching notes). To put that in context, that’s around 3.75 AP English Literature essays a week, or 4.2 AP English Language rhetorical analysis essays, or about half a SHARP paper.
Finally, we learn I still prefer to write alone. Very little change from last year, except it seems I write far more articles with Emi Gruender than previously (thank you, Groovy Movies!).
I hope you enjoyed this peak behind the curtains of a single writer’s statistics for The Shield. While my stats may seem a little crazy, keep in mind that there are so many incredible writers for The Shield, and without everyone’s super high word counts, collaborations, and articles per issue, The Shield would be a mere skeleton of what it is now! I think today we all learned I may write a little too much.