Thread: About the word count...

I'm almost ready to put up my story as a .txt but I have a question. Do misspelled words or words that do not exist count as words? I have a few words that obviously are not going to be in any dictionary considering they are indeed made up for a fantasy story. I want to know if they count as words. Also one of my characters is atrocious when it comes to the english language so purposely he says things as his own contraptions o his own version of the words. He speaks a lot and I'm afraid my word count will go down if what he says won't b counted as words.

I'm not sure exactly what all the NaNo word counter includes when it does its thing. They say it's less picky than most word processing word counters, but I don't know if that's true or not. I know val lost thirty words when she did it, and I ran mine through, since I'm almost done, and I lost over two hundred words. I also have a lot of made up fantasy names, so now I wonder.

When I hit the 50k mark, I'll probably run it through, then cut and paste however many words it drops--that way I will have my actual word count.

Words are words. But I'm not sure if the Nano thing is stupid or not.

Originally Posted by Ralizah

Words are words. But I'm not sure if the Nano thing is stupid or not.

That didn't really help me.

No it doesn't. Nanowrimo website even says that you can convert all your letters to a single letter to make the manuscript unintelligable and it would still count.

I gained about 20 words in my final 50,120 final submission. You may find that people lose words if they have put spaces before full stops as Word would treat that as a seperate word but I don't think Nanowrimo does.

My understanding is that the word checker doen't proof the text at all, it just looks for the usual syntactic identifiers of words. It's not as picky as some systems, so you're likely to gain some words if you use a lot of hyphens and stuff, but you might also lose a couple of words if you have certain other constructions. To be safe, write up until your word-counter says you've got a little over 50,000, then transfer to .txt and submit.

Val and Sel: dunno how you lost words... I gained several hundred... though I had a couple of sentences that were mostly hyphenated phrases...