posted
I've been using my word processor to do the word counting for me for as long as I've been writing.
Now, I'm also a member of another forum, and they recently introduced an automatic wordcount for submissions. I was surprised when I read that my 6500-word short story had turned into a 7900-word not-so-short story.
I thought about it a bit, and came to the conclusion that MS Word, which I use, counts by the amount of spaces between words. Thus, "I don't know" is three words.
On the other hand, the other forum's counting thingy must be counting all apostrophes as word separators, hence "I don't know" is four words. (lousy example, I know).
My question is, which one should I put above the story's title? Does it even matter (there is a 1400-word difference, so it does matter a lot to me), or do editors have their own way of calculating wordcount?
posted
Gee. In most instances I would probably rely on the the MS Word count (and then round up a bit. ie 6738 becomes 6800) unless the company I was submitting the manuscript to had made some special request in their submission guidelines.
Edit: What is interesting in your example is that IF MS word does count spaces then most typists put 2 spaces after each period. Does that count as an extra word? May not make much difference in the scheme of things. Drives me crazy though, especially when I receive a hard copy from a writer and they have double spaces AND use a machine italic rather than underline the word intended to be italicised.
[This message has been edited by hoptoad (edited February 21, 2006).]
posted
Here's a link for word counts; it'll explain how some editors do it. If they're using the method I think they are, it isn't unusual for the count to be up to 20% higher than the processor count.
posted
Yeah, looking at manuscript word count pages in the past, most of them say to rarely use the MSword word count, which I'm pretty sure actually gives you the exact number of words in your file. The idea is that a publisher/editor/etc doesn't really care how many words your story has, they care about how many pages it will take to print. So even if your story is 10 pages of dialogue, with lots of blank space on the page, that's still 10 pages. So the idea is to assume every manuscript-formatted page (Courier New, 12 point, 1 inch margins, etc) has 10 words per line and 25 lines per page (in other words 250 words per page).
And yes, since the whole point of this method is to ignore the difference between full lines of writing and short lines of, say, dialogue, it will always increase your "wordcount" by a decent amount, maybe 10-20%
posted
Its not rocket science and does not need to be precise.
Either method, Word Processor count or words times lines times pages traditional method is valid unless the submission guidelines for that particular publisher state otherwise.
It turns out MSWord counts words differently depending upon...well...how you count them.
I did some research and have yet to find a definitive answer on what constitutes a "word" for purposes of MSWord's Word Count dialog box (which is what pops up when you select "Word Count" from the "Tools" menu).
But I DID discover that the "Word Count" dialog box counts differently than VBA does(VBA is a macro programming language that underlies Office). The Words property of VBA includes such things as paragraph marks and punctuation. This could cause a significant discrepancy for any automatic word counting macro/program using VBA, and possibly Visual Basic. The proper way in VBA is to use the ComputeStatistics method, which gives identical results to the Word Count dialog box.
I did fire off an email to MS to see if we can't get a definitive answer on this.
Printer-friendly view of this topic
