From there it is only a small step to measuring "programmer productivity" in terms of "number of lines of code produced per month". This is a very costly measuring unit because it encourages the writing of insipid code, but today I am less interested in how foolish a unit it is from even a pure business point of view. My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent": the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger.
Putting such a great emphasis on word count strikes me as a terrible idea. Who wants to read 10,000 words? No one. What you want to read is a good story, or an interesting argument, or beautiful language. If the writing isn't any good, more words just mean more annoyance.
If you want to boost a specific metric, you almost always can. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the whole picture improves along with it.