Word Count discrepancies

The usual culprit for this is punctuation differences. Each word counter uses a different algorithm, and some are smarter than others. Ours is NOT very smart, and it's completely illiterate, so it counts the spaces between words. If you're not careful with punctuation, you can end up losing words to the NaNo counters.

Word may correctly count this:

"What...the?He said"

As four words.

However, the NaNoWriMo wordcount robots only see the spaces, so it only reads that as TWO.

Ellipses are big culprits; always be sure to include spaces after punctuations, and that should help.

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Heather Dudley
Forums Moderator
Liquid Story Binder, on sale for 50% off during November!
A Dragon Writes

Ohhhhhhhhhhhh! Ok. Since i'm rather afflicted with ... syndrome, that is probably where i lost some in my count.

Thanks!!

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Catie

"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't." Mark Twain

I will add that we have seen tremendous discrepancies with Open Office and its word counter -- last year I did a little digging and I found that Open Office counts hyphenated words (such as twenty-seven) as two words even though it is really one word. Footnotes and superscript fonts get counted oddly in OpenOffice as well. I seem to recall that it used to count opening quotation marks and en-dashes or em-dashes as words, too, though I think that has been resolved in more recent versions... So, that would explain the massive differences people see with Open Office.

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

Urgh. Don't get me started. According to OpenOffice I've typed 10584 words, yet the NaNo counter shows a word count of only 10051, which means I've already lost over 500 words due to the discrepancies. It's seriously starting to drive me nuts.

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Perhaps if we all email OpenOffice and ask them to fix it... because that's really incorrect grammar that they have it programmed as. Perhaps if we email them en masse, they'll have it changed in time for NaNo next year :)

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· Katharine
· ML of Elsewhere Australia
· Elsewhere Australia has a Twitter!

Well, as I said, some of the bugs have been corrected. I'm fairly sure that quotation marks, en-dashes and em-dashes no longer count as their own words. So, I think OpenOffice is aware that there are issues, but I don't know what their timing is or what they would do with 100k emails about word counting. For all I know, there's already 100k of them out there and the problem is "being worked on".

I use MS Word 2007 for all my writing and only have looked at Open Office to try to help out around here with these questions. So, I'm not an expert on these things by any means.

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

I agree with half your message, and I see what you mean by the other half, then I also agree ;)

I use scrivener. I don't know how it goes so far with discrepancies but we'll soon see.

Open Office is good because it's free, but I always used Word before I switched to Mac...
___
· Katharine
· ML of Elsewhere Australia
· Elsewhere Australia has a Twitter!

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___
· Katharine
· ML of Elsewhere Australia
· Elsewhere Australia has a Twitter!

Yeah I use Open Office and it's the same for me. I have the word count as 11821, the validator has it as 11696. Meh.

I'm not too bothered by having to through in an extra thousand words, seeing as the goal is 50,000 a thousand here or there doesn't seem like such a big deal. I am hopeful however that it doesn't go much further than that.

I've just tried Abi Word, another free Word Processor.

It gives me a count of 7448, whereas the validator, 7446. Open Office says 7714.

I'm not too bothered about it, but it did intrigue me.

Out of curiosity, what version of Open Office are you using?

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

Version 3.1.1, for Linux. It's the version installed with Ubuntu 9.10.

nanos ggivng me more words then Roughdraf.. who do i trust with out cheeting? SHould I just trust the more constive count?
I"m fine with that- but I have really bad spelling and punctuation and I *can't* go back to cheek or slow down - or I *will* lose? I'm learning disabled- (pulse I'm bi-polor and I have do idea what that will do to my meantil health) But I can take the lesser one just fine...

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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.

Since the win will be completely determined by the word counter here on this site, you should go with the count that is given by NaNoWriMo. However, if you work under the assumption that the wordcount from Rough Draft is the correct one, you'll certainly get enough words (assuming that the difference continues to be in your favor).

The word counting robots do not read your book so spelling and punctuation do not bother them at all. I'm sure you're doing absolutely fine!

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

Thankyou so Much!

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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 have posted above... the alleged Open Office bugs are not actually bugs. By any standard, Open Office should be counting FEWER words (since it counts un-spaced punctuation as one word) than another counter.

These supposed bugs, if you check, just do not occur. Try counting a single hyphenated word, or several words with punctuation and no space, and you will see.

Well, I'm not going to argue on this. All I can say is that over the years of doing this, I've found the discrepancies to be as described. There was a bug where it was counting hyphenated words as two words. There was (and still is) a bug where opening quotation marks are counted as words. In my posts about this last year, I included links to the bug reports from open office.org.

All that said, it does appear that a lot of these bugs have been fixed with Open Office 3.1.1; from what I've been seeing, folks who are seeing large discrepancies are using older versions of Open Office Writer.

Try this example:

I propose that this should count 9 words. Microsoft Word counts it as 10. NaNoWriMo counts it as 10. WriteMonkey counts it as 10. Open Office counts it as 11.

The reason for the discrepancies is that all four of these word processors are counting the en-dash between the second "thirty - seven" as a word (erroneously); if I change it to an em-dash, Word no longer counts it but the others still do.

The extra word that Open Office is counting is the opening quotation mark.

This is, obviously, a very simple example. But over the course of thousands of words of a novel, with real dialogue, this discrepancy could become rather large.

I hope this explains my thoughts more clearly.

Please note: if you copy my example sentence and paste it into a full-featured word processor such as Microsoft Word or Open Office Writer, the word processor will likely auto-correct the ellipsis that does not have a space after it -- to repeat this test, you'll have to remove the space that gets added.

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

"Opening quotation marks are a real big problem (they are counting opening quotes as a word). Open Office is counting two words separated by an ellipsis that does not have a trailing space as one word. Open Office counts em-dashes as words."

Here's the thing. I do not have the errors described in my MS. I'm not saying it's perfect, but I have grammar and spell check on and there just aren't 500 red underlines around. Again, I'm not saying I have perfect typing, but I have learned to type and I do not have dashes and ellipses everywhere. I avoid them like the plague (except in e-mails and on Facebook, where they have taken over my narrative XD but that is why I really try not to use them in my creative writing). I use hyphens (is that what you're calling an en-dash?) and periods, but there is no way that there are ten ellipses per page in my 50-page manuscript.

And yet, the discrepancy is 500 words!

I believe there are bugs. I believe they are in OO, because, well, it's pretty much every other word counter against OO.

But I also know that the bugs listed are not my bugs, and I want to know what I can do to make my word counter work better.

My list of potential trouble spots is just a set of examples. If you have dialogue and you put it in quotes, you can count your lines of dialogue and see some of the discrepancy. Just eyeballing my novel from last year, The first two pages contain dialogue that includes 27 opening quotes; if I extrapolate this out to the 175 pages, this would be 2363 extra words counted by Open Office. Obviously, there isn't dialogue on every page, so the discrepancy is much smaller. (Real numbers: MS Word and NaNo counted 61,344 words. Open Office counted 62,544 words. I'm sure that a lot, if not all, of this is the opening quotation.)

So, do you have dialogue? It may very well be just the quotes.

Without seeing your document, I can't say, specifically, what the discrepancy is. The things I have proposed are simply suggested areas to look for.

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

Microsoft Word in both the 2007 and Vista versions are consistantly giving me a word count that is one less than what the NaNo counter gives me. Probably have a couple of double-spaced sentences in there that it's reading funny...

That may be due to an em-dash. Word does not count em-dashes as words (because, well, they're NOT words), but NaNo and several other word processors do seem to count the em-dash as a word.

Again, I'm just guessing based on my own experience. Word has always been very, very close to the NaNo counter for me.

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

Actually, there's a little bug in our counter that, for some reason, adds ONE to the word count. It's probably a mislabeled loop somewhere, but it's nothing your word counter's doing wrong.

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Heather Dudley
Forums Moderator
Liquid Story Binder, on sale for 50% off during November!
A Dragon Writes

So does this effectively mean I have to write 51k? Joy.

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>> last year I did a little digging and I found that Open Office counts hyphenated words (such as twenty-
>> seven) as two words even though it is really one word.

"Twenty-seven" is only one word, but not all hyphenated compounds should be counted as one word. "A twelve-year-old kid" -- that's five words, punctuated correctly (i.e., you're not going to find "twelve-year-old," much less "twelveyearold," in the dictionary as an adjective). But the NaNo counter would call it three words, a harsh reduction! I guess the lesson is not to use hyphens at all. Or at least to have a laissez faire, live and let live attitude about them.

The NaNO word counter is illiterate, so it wouldn't have a way to tell what's supposed to be counted as a word, and what isn't. The lesson I've learned is to be sure and include a space after words that I want to be counted separately. :)

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Heather Dudley
Forums Moderator
Liquid Story Binder, on sale for 50% off during November!
A Dragon Writes

My point is that compound words are, in fact, one word. "pig tail" and "pigtail" are separate and distinct words with different meanings. The same is true with hyphenated compound words because they express one idea and the lack of a hyphen changes the meaning. So:

• "twelve-year-old kid" means an undetermined number of kids who are 12 and the entire compound word is modifying the noun kid
• "twelve year-old kids" means 12 kids who are the age of 1
• "twelve-year old kids" means an undetermined number of kids that started to be considered old twelve years ago
• "twelve year old kid" or "twelve-year-old-kid" means 1 kid who is the age of 12

The reality is that hyphens are falling out of use very rapidly (a fact which makes me rather sad indeed). Years ago "twelve-year-old-kid" would have been the only way to write that phrase when you wanted to specify that a kid was 12 years old; today, sped up in large part due to the internet, the hyphens are completely optional.

Ranges and other phrases that are separated by an en-dash (rather than a hyphen), such as "Read pages 6-13", should not be counted as one word and most word counters I've checked has gotten this correct (I believe NaNoWriMo still counts it as one).

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

Same here with me. Open Office 3.0 counts 20433 words, whereas the NaNO counter says 19777. Seems I DO have to write 51k to reach 50k :D

Let me reiterate that you are likely seeing the result of a mis-count in Open Office. Opening quotation marks are counted as a word by Open Office at this point and so if you have dialogue, every time you put a quotation mark into your manuscript to open a bit of dialogue, you're adding a "word". This means, of course, that you didn't actually WRITE that additional word.

So, yes, you'll have to write 51k in Open office (if your discrepancy continues to be consistent), but you're really writing 50,000 words.

So for example:

This is 12 words. Open Office is counting it as 15. I didn't write 15 words. If I take the opening quotes off, I get 12 words in Open office.

Does that make sense?

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

Sorry, your examples are entertaining, but I'm not buying it. (And "twelve-year-old-kid" is not what you say it is—it would be a compound modifier, as in "I'm tired of all these twelve-year-old-kid games." It would be incorrect as a noun.)

First of all, compounds by definition are not one word: Closed compounds are, obviously (notebook), but if there's a hyphen, it's two words that happen to be joined by a hyphen. (See Chicago 7.83). But also, word counts as we know them came to exist in the days of typesetting, so that editors and writers would know how many words could fit inside a column inch. Whether the word was hyphenated or not was irrelevant. Practically speaking, the sentence "The 55-year-old governor-elect joined his 30-year-old sister-in-law for ribbon-cutting ceremonies at the second-annual Easter-egg hunt" is just not 15 words long. It's 25.

Sorry if the above came off as petulant, by the way. Usually I can keep my petulance in check, but this week I was sick, so some systems were down.

There's a way of persuading OpenOffice to give you a more accurate wordcount. It's not exactly pretty, but I just tried it and it works.

Instead of using proper double quotation marks around dialogue, use single quotes (or apostrophes, if you will). A swift Find-and-Replace will fix the problem in whatever you've already written (although if it's auto-correcting straight quotes to curly ones, you'll need to make sure you ask it to find curly quotes).

Now I just have to find an extra 600 words from somewhere, but at least from now I'll know when I actually hit 50,000.

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Claire - ML for England :: York & Leeds + Moderator of Newbies