The "Limitations > Powers" point is probably the single thing that will keep the OPs use of magic from feeling like a "Deus Ex Machina". If magic can solve any problem, what's the point of reading the book if all conflict is resolved by literally waving a wand?

Rowling certainly seems to have figured out the recipe; make everyday magic seem like exactly that. Don't have the characters draw attention to anything they're doing with magic that would seem ordinary to them. The more spectacular or difficult stuff, sure, go into some detail including character reactions, but pulling out plates or silverware from the drawer with a wave of a hand or wand, just say they do it and move on. This may require, as in Rowling's universe, not using magic in front of people who don't know magic exists.

I agree completely with Lauren Ipsum. Unless you're hired out of school to write for some larger group, such as being a technical writer, journalist, copy-editor, etc, writing isn't your main job, until it is. Freelancing rarely earns you a living wage right off the bat unless you're very lucky.

From what I can find, really only the very first one (a narrative style) is a hard requirement of a poetic ballad. All others derive from a secondary quality that they're designed for a musical setting, which you narrow to a traditional or popular musical setting with the restrictions on syllable structure and rhyme scheme. Theoretically any narrative you can set to music is a ballad; see "The Ballad of Baby Doe" which meets no other requirements of yours.

So yellow journalism is libel, sensationalism maybe not?

@Aerovistae - Meh. The four things Lauren gave as basic measurements for print layout would take maybe 2 minutes to set up in Word. Kerning, line and paragraph spacing widths of hyphens and em-dashes, real typesetter stuff, that would be obsessive IMO especially if you bought InDesign or FrameMaker for the purpose, but along the lines of the question regarding converting a handwritten manuscript to type, I wouldn't consider it a bad thing to know your approximate page count. And I do find Lauren's excesses funny :-)

I also remember, in New Moon, Stephanie Meyer stylistically chose to have several pages with just the month name as a chapter heading to show the passage of time as a fog of "unawareness" on Bella's part. There isn't a single word in any of those "chapters", but they show up in the TOC. That probably takes the cake.

This sounds more like a question for English.SE or ELL.SE

Till now? You want me to get out the ox team and plow my field right this very second?

WRT approximately equal word count, even that's a very rarely-observed rule. As one simple example. see How to Eat Fried Worms; there are "chapters" that depending on print format are only one or two pages.

Not an actual example, but this was the first thing I thought of: dilbert.com/strip/1998-11-28