I might be off by a factor of 2 in that estimate, but not much more.
Most of our communication is via chat. Then there are ticket specs and comments. Project overviews and status updates. PR descriptions and comments. Documentation. ADRs. Retros and incident reports. Meeting agendas, notes, and writeups. The occasional email. LLM prompts. Last week I spent 5k words in a few hours just breaking down a large planned project to ticket-level bullet points so we could give an appropriate estimate for roadmapping. (Which turned out to be crucial, because it revealed that the requested timeline for a pilot was too short by at least a factor of 2 even for the most descoped version the stakeholders would accept, and we had the receipts to convince the CTO.)
I’m definitely not spending most of my days writing novels, but all the sentences add up.