Surprising Word Count Quirks

[CarolMS]

In the midst of struggling, paragraph after paragraph and sentence by sentence, to shave words off my manuscript word count, I've discovered that what is counted as a word in my document--whether in OpenOffice Writer (.odt) or MS Word (.doc)--can be quite different from what I thought. A word is a word is a word, right? And an em dash or elipsis is just punctuation—or is it?

How many words do you think are in each of the following examples?

"I thought he liked me, but then, well . . . I don't know . . . ." Eleven? Eighteen!

— THE PREVIOUS YEAR — Three? Five!
(This is the way I formatted my Part I, II, III and IV section title pages, so that makes eight em dash 'words'.)

She swirled around and — ooff! — collided with the now-departing hunky guy. Eleven? Twelve? Thirteen!
vs. as I wrote it:
She swirled around and—ooff!—collided with the now-departing hunky guy. Eleven? Twelve? Nine!
(Weird, but at least fewer, not more words.)

* * * Zero? Three!

*** Zero? One!

— Zero? One!

Yes, a stand-alone em dash counts as one word! And if you attach it to a word (no space), the actual word counts as one but the em dash no longer has a value. I think I presented my sentences correctly formatted: an elipsis within a sentence is written as . . . and at the end of a sentence it is . . . . And an em dash — is attached to the words it sets off, rather than free-floating. But what, when checking word count, have my wondering eyes beheld? Throughout my novel, a ceaseless outpouring of little gems like the examples above, all potentially messing with my word count!

Is there a way to avoid some of this? It would be nice not to add three words every time I type an elipsis or three spaced-apart asterisks to indicate a significant scene break! Good grief. Have any of you found a solution to this? (Other than improper formatting, such as writing ... for an elipsis instead of the, I believe, correct . . . ?)

Love to hear people's thoughts on this.

 

[JohnBertel]

I suppose how special characters should be counted in the word count depends on what the count is going to be used for. If it is to give a rough estimate of the page count in the printed book, then they should be included somehow. How exactly they should be counted, I guess there are no rules for, as it will be rough estimate anyway.

 

[Hannah F]

Be careful of your dashes. There are rules.

The en dash is the one your keyboard automatically gives you (except here so I'll paste it in). It is as long as the letter n and has a space on either side.
The tax collector searched around – no doubt for things to steal – and found a boar who’d lost a trotter in one pen and an owl who couldn’t fly in another. (excerpt from one of my novels).

The em dash is the the length of a letter m and has no space either side. If you are using windows, press ctrl+Alt+minus.
The tax collector searched around—no doubt for things to steal—and found a boar who’d lost a trotter in one pen and an owl who couldn’t fly in another.

They are both the same in this context, so whichever you choose will be the one most used in your genre (probably) or country, though there's no right or wrong.

If you use one instead of a colon, it should be the em dash. If you use one to separate numbers (instead if the word "to"), it should be an en dash. Neither are a hyphen which is much shorter. Always take care when line-editing (that's a hyphen) that you don't accidentally turn a dash into a hyphen.

 

[Peyton Stafford]

This is why I write in Scrivener.

 

[CarolMS]

Well, this is iinteresting! I just came across this advice on Louise Harnby's Editing Blog. She shows the differences between the UK and US.

In the UK, it’s conventional to use a SPACED EN DASH. This is not the law, not a rule, not the only way or the right way. It’s just the style that many UK publishers choose, though not all.

Here’s an example from my version of Stephen King’s The Outsider (p. 171):

The yard – every single blade of grass seeming to cast a shadow in the moonlight – was empty.


In the US, it’s conventional to use a CLOSED-UP EM DASH. Again, this is not the law, not a rule, not the only way or the right way. It’s just the style that many US publishers choose, though not all.

Here’s what King’s sentence looks like when amended according to US convention:

The yard—every single blade of grass seeming to cast a shadow in the moonlight—was empty.


Some style guides even ask for SPACED EM DASHES, though I see this usage less frequently:

The yard — every single blade of grass seeming to cast a shadow in the moonlight — was empty.


I recommend you stick to spaced en dashes or closed-up em dashes in fiction because that’s what your readers will be most familiar with. As for which style you should choose, think about:

• where your target audience is based
• what they’re used to seeing

If you’re publishing internationally, pick one style and be consistent.

Here's the link to her the complete blog post from which the above is excerpted.

How to use dashes in fiction: UK and US style

Are your hyphens, en dashes and em dashes giving you the run-around? Here’s a guide to conventional usage in UK and US fiction publishing.

www.louiseharnbyproofreader.com

 

[CarolMS]

The en dash is the one your keyboard automatically gives you (except here so I'll paste it in). It is as long as the letter n and has a space on either side.

I suppose I may be a bit weird in how I insert em dashes, since rather than using the keyboard's automatic insertion method, I've always manually inserted a long em dash by obtaining it from the "General Punctuation" options in the Insert Features section of OpenOffice. I didn't even know about the keyboard shortcut method (typical for me, learning as I go as I am).

And I musr admit, I thought it is a rule in the US to write them with closed spaces, but apparently it's just customary. I've seem some self-published books that do it differently, but I don't think I've ever read a book tradirionally published in the US that doesn't use the closed, longer em dash. I suspect that may be changing, since people write so differently on the web, and changes are filtering into other forms of publishing. So far, though, in terms of traditional, I've only seen it in non-fiction books, and even that's been rare.

I still don't understand why they count a spaced dash or an asterisk (or whatever symbol) as a word when one does a word count. I suspect my novel has several thousand such "words" in it, and since I'm struggling to shave off words as I am, that's a bit frustrating.

The Harnby post was interesting to read (see the excerpt I separately posted).

 

[Hannah F]

em dashes are more common in the US and in historical fiction. en dashes are more common in the UK. Equally double quotation marks" are more common in the US and single in the UK. But they are just style preferences (except for the occasions I mentioned above where they differ).

 

[Peyton Stafford]

My advice? Small stuff. Anal retentive. Do not sweat it.