Dummy text for dummies
This much I know – it’s much harder to write an article of 250 words than one of 2,500. The word count of articles I’ve written for Dance Gazette over the last 12 years has gone from 1750, to 1,000, 750, to 500, to 400, and now 250, and it gets more difficult with every reduction. What I do now for anything under 1500 words is to block out the article using dummy text so that I can see how it’s going to look on the page, and decide how to arrange the paragraphs – a short opener, thick middle and brief conclusion? Five equal paragraphs? 4 of increasing size plus a one line ending? You get the idea.
For long articles, I use the Lorem ipsum generator (lorem ipsum are the first two words of standard dummy text used in publishing). Update on 16th January 2019: thank you to Victoria Mesber who recommended the lorem ipsum generator at Website Planet which provides the same service, but free of ads.
If it’s just a mini task in Word (‘write no more than 50 words of description’) I use Word’s in-built dummy-text generator, one of my favourite party-tricks
