I’m wriitng a novel as part of National Novel Writing Month; the object is to get a novel finished entirely in the month of November. The fundamental rule is that your work has to be 50,000 words long or it is not a novel.
My novel, counted by Openoffice’s “Word Count” tool, has 30,659 words.
The same novel, cut and pasted into NaNoWriMo’s Word Counter, has 30,058 words.
Why is there a variance of 601 words? I’m not willing to print it out and count it myself, but that seems weird to me.
I’m thinking you meant to put this thread in Cafe Society, so I’ve transplanted it.
Every computer program is going to have a different count (in general)–which means that different computers will give you different counts (in general). If there is a way to correct for this, I don’t know what it is. Just choose one and stick with it. Since this is for NaNo, go by their official count.
You can also format your page so that you have 250 words per page. I know how to do this quickly and easily in Word, but I don’t know if it would be the same process in Open Office.
Most word counting software is estimating the word count rather than giving you an exact figure. A difference of 2% is reasonable for different algorithms.
Word counters are the bane of writing.
A page with a 250-word long sentence takes up the same amount of room as a page with 25 one-word sentences. Either can be a legitimate piece of a novel.
In the Good Old Days, word count was done strictly by using the type font and the number of lines of a page to give a running average. (a 30-line page in 12 point Courier had about 11 words per line. Therefore it had 330 words per page or, better, 1000 words every three pages. 10 point Courier on a 25-line page gave 250 words or four pages per 1000. Nice and neat and requiring next to no multiplication.) The actual number of words, something heavily affected by dialog, never mattered.
Now the world has been brainwashed to think that it isn’t the amount of space required by the finished product that counts, but the number of words, a number that bears no necessary relationship to the final size.
You need to ask yourself what your real goal is. Is it writing 50,000 words? Or is it writing a novel of, say, 200 pages of an average of 250 words each. They are not the same goal.
Just go for whichever one is more meaningful to you.
[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase)You need to ask yourself what your real goal is. Is it writing 50,000 words? Or is it writing a novel of, say, 200 pages of an average of 250 words each. They are not the same goal.
Just go for whichever one is more meaningful to you. [/QUOTE]
I, personally, don’t really care how many words it ends up being; it’s just fun to see if you can hit the 50,000 mark by Nov 30. The novel won’t really be done by then; it’ll be at least ten to twenty percent longer than that, and in any case I want to put it aside for a few weeks and given it a good first edit. My goal’s to write a novel I’m happy with.
It doesn’t really matter anyway, but *of course *I didn’t mean to put it in Cafe Society. It’s a straightforward, factual question.
Do you use Linux or know someone who does? If so, make a text-only copy (as a .txt), and use the built-in program wc. It will count every group of characters that is followed by a space as a word. (So it’ll count 2 words as one if you use em dashes correctly&emdash;like this, but works well otherwise.)
I don’t know if a windows version exists.
Do you have a cite for this?
Counting words exactly is a dead-simple algorithm: just count how many clumps of letters/symbols separated by whitespace or other word separators there is. I can’t imagine that implementing some kind of approximation algorithm would be simpler. The only real difference would be what you consider to separate words. Whitespace obviously separates words, but maybe other symbols do, too. Emdash should, probably, as it will when used correctly. In the sentence above, “letters/symbols” is clearly two words, so maybe “/” should be considered as a word separator, too.
The difference is probably in what Open Office considers to be a word separator. Brief testing with version 2.x shows that it considers “-”, “/”, “@”, and “:” to be word separators. NaNoWriMo’s calculator probably just considers whitespace (as it should, since that’s what wc does, and wc is a de facto standard).
It wouldn’t surprise me if you had about 600 hyphenated words in a 30K word document.
Interestingly, the California Rules of Court (Rule 8.204(c)(1)) mandate a maximum length of 14,000 words for documents, but does not specify how to count, other than to rely on the word count of the computer program used to create the document. It is not necessary to describe the software used, and the courts do not have their own system to count words.
Documents prepared on a typewriter are limited to 50 pages, irrespective of actual word count, presumably to relieve anyone from the torture of manually counting words.
Hear, hear! I have to deal with this all the time, since my column has to be one page, which is about 550 words in our format. Luckily my editor can make small formating changes if it goes a little over, so we don’t enforce this exactly. However I have chopped 1,000 word submissions down when the writer didn’t want to. It is actually excellent practice, since it is easier to cut the fat out of someone else’s work than yours. I found that having to cut a paper from 10 pages to 6 for a duplicate submission was much easier with this experience - not that I didn’t have to chop whole sections also.
I use BBEdit for anything like that. It’s pretty darn bulletproof and can handle a pretty imposing amount of text for analysis.
Tell you how many indiv characters (spaces included) as well as how many words.
And how many paragraphs (lines, return-delimited).