I am writing a 5000 word story for a competition.
As I type it up on screen it says I have got 4893 words.
When I click on properties then details it says I have 3881 words.
Anyone else noted this?
Short of adding them all up which one is likely to be right?
The problem of differing word counts really do matter when I enter competitions.
If I go over the word allowance my submission will be rejected. If the people who are checking your word count use 1 system and I use the other this may mean that my story is kicked straight into the bucket without being read.
I could just use the lower count as the one I use, how the hell do I enter a competition asking for exactly 100 words.
I will do a test story with both loads of/none of hyphenated words,
Of course it may just be that I am putting full stops etc in the wrong place.
I'd be interested to know if Paul Rogers' method gives you a totally new number!
I hadn't known about the two other methods (I use "tools word count"), but I have 2 laptops. One has Word installed, the other Open Office. These two give different values for the same text.
I believe that one system counts hyphenated words as TWO words. It's also possible that one counts "you've" as two words (you have). And one of them counts *** as if it were a word (probably also just *). So if you use asterisks to separate different phases of your writing, you'll get a difference.
Mind you, if you use *** over a thousand times in less than 4,000 words, that's a wee bit extreme.
left click on the word count in the bottom left hand corner. This will open a new window detailing the correct amount of words, characters etc.