My word processor counts differently...

I'm moving this to tech help.

Typically, the issue with the word count discrepancies is going to be either formatting (missing a space after punctuation marks, for example) or bugs in the word processor's word counter. Some word processors count hyphenated words, such as "twenty-seven" as two words while they are really just one. There was a bug in one word processor last year that was counting opening quotation marks as a word... so the more dialogue you had, the bigger the discrepancy was!

So, you can go through and look for the common punctuation issues: missing spaces after commas, missing spaces after ellipses, missing spaces after em-dashes or en-dashes. Fix those and you may find better consistency between the wordcounters. You can see if you have a lot of hyphenated words and try an experiment of removing the hypen on a few to see if the word count decreases. But that's about all you can do other than keep pasting things into the word count validator and then planning to write enough words to cover the difference.

The reality is, though, that most likely you have not written those 1000 extra words your word processor is saying you have. It is probably punctuation, formatting or bugs that are giving you that boost.

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NaNo 2006(win): "Children of the Stars"
NaNo 2007(win): "Darkness Falls"
NaNo 2008(win): "Dark Storm Rising"

I do not know what could cause it- but I remember Word used to have a simmler problem Ideadss:
1. well you could always subtract -1000 from what it tells your for a rough tole. (I'd find that depressing.)
2. Find an online word counter program (a free one) I do not have a link of hand but I used several years ago.
3. Download another (free) wordprocceror. I like RoughDraft- its free, and it is set for rtf. which used to (and may still be I do not know) the Valadators perfered type of text. (It also has a note pad on the side of your file- on the other hand you have to open saved docs *from* Roughdreaft or they will open in your defalt program- and lately my text wont show up when I open it unless I highlight all and change the color fo the text-even though it already says its in black,...

I hope some of that helped at least a little.
EDIT:
I just dubble cheeked- roughdraf gave me more words then neano- sop much for that helping..

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Mr. L Alexander.,
I never knew how much your books not only shaped me- but met to me, until a few weeks ago. No one who grew up with your books grew up alone thank you.

*swallows* I never proof during nanao- and my puntion and spelling very bad. This could be *very* bad.

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Mr. L Alexander.,
I never knew how much your books not only shaped me- but met to me, until a few weeks ago. No one who grew up with your books grew up alone thank you.

I'm not saying you *should* proofread or edit, I'm just saying that this is usually the source of 99% of the word count discrepancies. So, if you don't get upset about the differences, then you're golden no matter what you do. But some people do get upset about the difference and so I wanted to make sure it was known that the issues are *typically* fixable via editing.

Note that I'm not saying that there are no bugs with the NaNo word counter. I'm just saying that in my experience here on the site and the forums, most of the differences come from these issues.

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NaNo 2006(win): "Children of the Stars"
NaNo 2007(win): "Darkness Falls"
NaNo 2008(win): "Dark Storm Rising"