Care to explain?

kelliewallace · Dec 18, 2012

I recently finished my first urban fantasy novel and I was trying to reach 50,000 words to submit to a publisher I like.
On Microsoft word it says my word count is 48,200 words, yet on Open office it's 50,200. How does that make sense? It's the same book, same everything. Where is 2000 words?

Cyia · Dec 18, 2012

One is likely counting contractions as one word, while the other is counting them as two. Go with the count in Word, as it's the more standard measure.

SianaBlackwood · Dec 18, 2012

Depending on the version of OpenOffice, you may also have run into the infamous issue with the curly quotes/smart quotes counting as words. If you prefer writing in OpenOffice over Word, I'd advise upgrading to the current version of LibreOffice. Testing during last NaNoWriMo suggested that the bug had been squashed somewhere around LO 3.5 and I think it was squashed in Apache OpenOffice at about the same version number.

Torgo · Dec 18, 2012

I think Word will also ignore text footnotes and endnotes (which might get you 2000 words if you are, say, Terry Pratchett or Jonathan Stroud) and headers and footers (which you probably do want to ignore.)

Care to explain?

kelliewallace

Cyia

Rewriting My Destiny

SianaBlackwood

Torgo

Formerly Phantom of Krankor.