Field notes
Playbooks, teardowns and the occasional argument — everything we have learned helping creators grow across every major platform.
Nothing is wrong with the words. There are just fourteen sentences in a row of between twelve and sixteen, and an average is the one statistic that cannot see it.
Between 105 and 180 words, and the range is not vagueness - it is the difference between a Reels voiceover and a live presentation. Pick the pace and the number is exact.
A shot list has six columns and one job: make sure nothing is discovered on shoot day. Here is the template, what each column is for, and the two columns people add that make it worse.
A prompter app wraps text on width, which means a line can end on "the". Where the breaks go is the whole format, and it is the one thing the app cannot decide for you.
Filler is usually treated as a style problem. On a video with a fixed runtime it is an arithmetic problem, and the number worth reading is seconds rather than words.
Every opening line belongs to one of about six shapes, and each shape obliges the rest of the video differently. Pick the shape first; the wording is the easy half.
A video script is four decisions, not a document: what the first line promises, how long the middle is allowed to be, what you actually say, and what has to be on screen while you say it.
Content repurposing works when it is planned before the piece is made. Here is a mapping from one long video to a fortnight of posts across platforms.
Words per minute speaking varies from 110 to 160 depending on format. Here is how to convert a script to a runtime before you record it.