Counting words · 4:27pm Aug 4th, 2012
I am becoming persuaded that every editor in existence counts them differently. Google is full of people who have found discrepancies between how many words they think they wrote and how many words Microsoft Word thinks they wrote.
I didn't pay any attention to this phenomenon, of course, until I landed here. I wrote The Sparkle Chronicles in the WordPress editor, since it's the one I use most often these days. The three chapters published here so far are listed at 3278 + 2830 + 3886 = 9994 words. WordPress says 3186 + 2727 + 3720 = 9633.
None of this presents any particular problem -- I mean, it's not like I get paid by the word for anything I write, and I'm not going to sit here all day and count words myself -- but it is the sort of thing I agonize over for No Good Reason At All.
Well, that's an interesting glitch. Does it count non-word characters like punctuation?
I'm really not sure where the discrepancies fall. I know WordPress doesn't count anything inside an anchor link, but since there aren't any in the story, that can't account for it.
Perhaps it's in how compound words are figured. ("Two-hooved drinkers" might be two words in one editor, three in another.) I don't really consider this a "glitch," which implies that something is doing something other than what it's intended to do. And really, I wouldn't blame the FF crew for using a broad definition of "words," inasmuch as you have to have at least a thousand of them in your opening chapter.
And just to indulge my OCD: I put back in 51 (per WordPress) or 52 (per FIMFiction) words I'd struck from Chapter 3. (They're at the bottom.) Counting by hand (or hoof, I suppose), I get 52, so maybe it's that WP is undercounting by a shade.