Experiment #3: 750 Words (Day 2)

This morning, after some much-needed coffee, I hopped online and visited 750 words for my second day of writing. Now, I know that this is supposed to be a stream-of-consciousness style of journaling, and my entry today certainly followed that path. I started writing about my morning, and quickly took a deep dive into a tangent on wordplay and language. I really enjoyed the process, and I found myself asking a lot of questions that I usually ignore, in daily routine. That's the point. Each journal page ends with the following: "750 words -- Private, unfiltered, spontaneous, daily."

The stats are still my favorite sections, so I spent a bit of time exploring them today. What I found was a veritable treasure trove of numbers, all done up in party dresses (graphs of all kinds and colors). For example, I was talking to my boyfriend, Michael, while I was typing, and I could see how my writing slowed down when I started to pay attention to him, and how long it took me to get back up to my usual writing speed. Some of the statistics won't be as useful or as interesting until I have been able to collect them over time, but so far, I write about twice as fast as the rest of the participants, and I use far fewer "ah's" and "um's" than the majority of them. Here, take a look! Here are my stats for the last two days. Go ahead, be their prom dates.

Day 1; Friday, December 02, 2011
Day 2; Saturday, December 03, 2011

Oooooh, pretty.

Here's the thing, though: this isn't quite enough to satisfy my curiosity, so I decided to run this experiment using a second journal as well, for comparison. The faux journal of Edgar Allan Poe, under the pseudonym of Annabel Lee. The timing doesn't matter as much; I'm only curious to see how his personality developed over the course of his writing career. The timing doesn't really matter, as long as I add each poem, story, or article in the order in which they were originally penned. After all, it would be pretty pointless to compare his mindset with that of the general population in 2011...but it might be fun to check it out anyway, after I have a fair amount of his works entered into the journal. I assure you, it's legal, as all of his works published before 1923 are considered public domain, and are easily found through legal avenues on the internet.

The only downside is that I am meticulously adding each of his works, line for line, and no one will ever be able to read them. As of now, 750 words allows you to share your statistics with others, but not your actual entries. I understand that this is a way to encourage unfiltered writing, and to allay common fears about online security; I just wish that I had the option to share everything. Oh, also, once the clock ticks down and rolls over to the next day, you no longer have the opportunity to edit the previous day's entry. This is another way to keep people honest/unfiltered, but if I miss something while working on Poe's entries, it could potentially skew his results. Over time, though, these errors would become less important, and an overall picture of his character would probably remain the same.

The Poe project will be MUCH longer, but I'm willing to do the work for the sake of curiosity alone. For now, enjoy the stats from his first two poems, and feel free to email me at poe.poster@gmail.com if you'd like updates on his progress beyond the end of December.