I was just posting my often but not often enough news article for my website. And looking at the frontpage, I thought to myself, hey James theres a lot of writing on this page, maybe theres too much. I usually have about three or four news stories on my front page, when I write more I move the oldest to past news. This is the longest my frontpage has ever been, for those that don't feel like visiting my site, the little blue scroll bar on the right side of your browser window is about 1/3 the size of the movable area, theres got to be a better way to word that but that should be enough to figure it out. Anyways as always, thanks for helping me out.
I dunno if the quantity of text has signifanct effects on you rankings. But, i try to shoot for somewhere between 750 and 1500 words on a page.
1500 words is real high - Hard to make that an easy read - Keyword densisty / frequency is important. Characters are the important count rather than words - and its breaks down between body text / links / h1 etc - 3500 characters is nice - But who really knows