Ms. Sutton recorded the word counts and scores of the top ten essays in a timed writing contest. The table shows her data.

A 3-row table with 10 columns. The first row is labeled essay rank with entries 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. The second row is labeled essay score with entries 9.7, 9.5, 9.5, 9.0, 8.9, 8.9, 8.5, 8.4, 8.2, 7.0. The third row is labeled word count with entries 324, 352, 337, 318, 299, 304, 290, 291, 278, 250.

How does the word count of an essay relate to its score in the contest?

Word count tends to decrease as the score decreases.
Word count tends to increase as the score decreases.
Word count tends to remain constant as the score decreases.
Word count has no apparent relationship to the score of the essay.