Hello. I've wanted to elaborate more on how I originally came up with the challenge and how the word limits system works. There are a few reasons why I want to do this; for starters, it might be interesting for other folk to apply the same methods to different lengths or types of visual media (such as the EqG movies or the web shorts). It would also be good to have the methods used on record so people who are so inclined can examine them and pick apart flaws or problems with the system, and maybe adapt it to better suit certain stuff.

There are two methods that I've developed. One was done a long time ago to pretty much answer the same question as I wanted now; if you were to try to recreate the pacing of an episode in a story, how would you do it?

Originally I thought to use reading speeds. My idea was that if people read at an average reading speed of 200 words per minute, and an episode was about 20 or so minutes long, then the length of a story could be determined.

Essentially, the formula looks like the following:

Since we know that an episode is 22 minutes (approximately) long and that average reading speeds range from 200 wpm to 250 wpm, we can find that the word count is between 4400 and 5500 words. Pretty short!

The second method, which is the one I'm using here, uses average dialogue densities.

I took the data (which can be found here and was written by a Canadian author named Jefferson Smith) and found that, on average, the dialogue density in a novel is 29.62%. There's a lot of variability to this, which I'll discuss later.

I then went and found a few episode transcripts and found the average amount of dialogue in an episode; turns out it's around 2250 words. This means that, assuming that in our stories the dialogue density should remain constant, the average word count should be 7587 words (which I reduced down to 7500 words here for simplicity).

There are some weaknesses to both systems. The first one assumes that pacing means something should take the same time to convey the same information, even though the media are entirely different. This might be decent enough for a bit of a rough comparison but I'm not convinced it's a reasonable assumption to make for anything more than that.

The second method strikes me as very sensible but I suffer from a lack of data. Jefferson only analysed a small sample of books, meaning that the standard deviation of word counts based on this method (based on his data) ranges from about 5000 to 15000 words, which is pretty insane. I reduced that range for the purposes of the challenge, but it's obvious that I need more data to be confident that the word counts I'm using are the most accurate and best ones to use.

It also doesn't really account for if MLP actually is differently paced than what one might consider an 'average' episode. If it crams an excessive amount of stuff for its dialogue, for instance, this may invalidate to a certain extent our efforts using this method. On the other hand, if it is paced differently and this method shows that in writing form, then actually I'd argue that it works just fine.

It's still the best I currently have, but there you go.

Good stuff. If anyone has any other methods, I'd be happy to hear them!