Editing Telegraphy (section)

==== Telegram length ====

As telegrams have been traditionally charged by the word, messages were often abbreviated to pack information into the smallest possible number of words, in what came to be called "[[telegram style]]".

The average length of a telegram in the 1900s in the US was 11.93 words; more than half of the messages were 10 words or fewer.<ref>{{cite book |last1= Hochfelder |first1=David|title= The Telegraph in America, 1832–1920 |date=2012 |publisher=The Johns Hopkins University Press |page=79 |url= https://books.google.com/books?id=fUDxx_bMVQUC&pg=PA79 |isbn= 978-1-42140747-0}}</ref> According to another study, the mean length of the telegrams sent in the UK before 1950 was 14.6 words or 78.8 characters.<ref name="Frehner">{{cite book |last1= Frehner |first1=Carmen|title=Email, SMS, MMS: The Linguistic Creativity of Asynchronous Discourse in the New Media Age |date=2008 |publisher=Peter Lang AG |location=Bern |pages=187, 191 |url= https://books.google.com/books?id=wiVz8dDW8-cC&pg=PA191 |isbn= 978-303911451-1}}</ref> For German telegrams, the mean length is 11.5 words or 72.4 characters.<ref name= "Frehner"/> At the end of the 19th century, the average length of a German telegram was calculated as 14.2 words.<ref name="Frehner"/>