The short answer? 750; at least so this assignment dictates. The other short answer? Proverbially, 1000; at least so the common English adage dictates. But to your everyday AP Literature student who only has the time to give his 2 cents on something before another assignment is due, how many words is this picture worth? The long answer? Let’s find out.
At first glance, this image is of a green, swampy land, the air filled with dense, moist condensation. Are we done? Not yet, I still need at least 661 more words for this assignment.
Jokes aside, this picture is truly quite beautiful, and a keen representation of nature. The main focus of the image is the landscape itself, the misty meandering river flowing abrasively through the green land. In a way, it forms a ditch, the erosion of which, considering the considerable lack of volume of water, must have taken hundreds of years, if not thousands of years, to develop such a smooth ridge. To the point of smoothness, it is a wonder how the sparse, almost dead, land in the foreground is so considerably more textured than the smooth green immediately behind it. Why might one patch of land be spiked with grass and branches and general foliage, whereas the land adjacent to it is softened by a greenery so much so like the water that cuts through it, the boundary between the two more like a waterfall than solid earth. For all we know, it may not be solid.
I could go on like this for who knows how long, noting random details, and hopping down rabbit holes. Turns out, an excellent way to have more to say about things is rather counterintuitive; why say more, when you could simply say, more. Quantity over quality, an idea of which certainly leads pictures to easily be worth a thousand words. Can quantity and quality coexist? Or, for that matter, is quality necessarily coherent?
Eloquence is not to be mistaken with value, and although it is a common mistake as a result of the best writers writing in confusing but achingly artistic ways, it is an inexcusable one, or so says the incessant pledge of the English teacher. Quantity and quality are not mutually exclusive; after all, Shakespeare’s plays are held in high regard, but are also high in presentation time. How come his plays that leave so many questions unanswered, and have thus spurred countless arguments, are works of quality, but the straightforward, unambiguous, and much more pleasurable reading experience of Geronimo Stilton is not held in the same light?
To that matter, why tell stories at all? Why spend time preaching about morals in a form so ambiguous that its definition is questionable? Perhaps it is inherent to attach sentiment to human experience, and thus by stories, people can learn by feeling, rather than simply being told.
Then why a picture? They are only a fragment of a story yet untold, a moment detached from explanation, a frozen slice of reality. How is it that a picture can convey anything at all, or have any value other than purely description? How is it that a single picture can mean a thousand words but a single word can only mean one?
What story does our picture tell? Or first, how can we say it’s our picture? I found it, but I didn’t take it. You’ve only read about it from some guy on the internet. Who’s to say the picture is even real? I found it on a random picture generator website.
Even the most random things have stories; so goes the English paradigm. Phrases have stories; “baby shoes, unworn,” a sad tale, perhaps of a miscarriage, of misfortune. Our picture has a story too, I like to think. One of a photographer waiting for just the right moment of sun to glean brightly, for the mist to swirl mysteriously, for the green marshes to sparkle with a brilliantly dull sheen. Of the art of patience, truly an art, for in nature, there is no frame better than the perfect moment of time. Is mother nature an artist? Or a confused woman pursuing a passion left carefully attended to, yet with no direction other than what meets the eye?
So it goes that pictures and moments of time, or anything for that matter, are merely prompts for the continued thought of man… and that pictures really are only worth 750 words.
Hello Eron,
In fact, you can quantify how much a picture is worth in words! To do this, let’s assume that a picture can be represented as an a by b set of pixels, where a is the width of the picture and b is its height. Since each pixel can be one of 2^24 different colors (assuming the standard RGB model), the picture holds a total of 24*a*b bits.
To calculate the equivalent amount of information that this stores in words, we need to define something called the _entropy_ of a word, which is the number of bits the “average” word holds (where “average” is taken in a weighted notion; read more on the Wikipedia article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)).
Shannon (1951) estimates word entropy in English to be about 11.82, but Grignetti (1964) says this is around 9.8. For estimation’s sake, let’s assume this value is about 10. Thus, the total number of words the picture represents is 24*a*b/10. The image you provided in your post is approximately 1000 x 1000 (I’m too lazy to actually figure out the exact number) so that means it’s worth approximately… 2 million words!
Hi Eron,
I like how you spun this innocent looking question: how many words is a picture worth? into so much more. I think that the contrast between quantity and quality is really interesting. While I agree that the two aren’t mutually exclusive, I think the smaller the quantity, the more important quality becomes. For example, poetry has very little “quantity” in the sense of the word, since there are very few words compared to novels, yet it is a window into the human experience and the soul, and it can be very meaningful. This means that (in my opinion) it’s harder to write good poetry, since every word and every decision means so much more. The quality stands out more.