Word Count Blog

It is commonly understood that writing professionals get paid by word count. And most often it is so.

But still, it is not the only way of defining the charge for your work.  And in some cases, word count is just not the right method to estimate the work you have done.

Writers should not aim to create a long text, but a good one.  In that case, getting paid by word count may lead you to the longest novel you’ve ever written, but not the best one. So in her blog ”Should Writers Be Paid By Word Count?” Laura Spencer suggests setting the quote by word count range (for example, “around 3000 words” or “600 to 800 words”).

Translators’ productiveness may range depending on the text. For example, you can translate 500 words of an average text an hour, but get stuck with the same 500 words of technical text for good 3 hours. You can, of course, define the rates depending on the text specialization. Or, as Corinne McKay describes in her article “How To Set Your Translation Rates By Using Objective Information”,   you can set your rates per hour.

I hope you will be paid well no matter what you charge for.

12: 4972/4283/697/55

I guess professional translators and other professionals often dealing with word count are well acquainted with this magic formula. Are you?

You may count your productiveness as, for example, 1 page per day. How much is it in characters? Characters with spaces? Lines? Being commonly asked to create text with certain word count, I still sometimes get lost. So I took a page of plain text with little formatting and the statistics is…

	Characters with spaces	Characters without spaces	Words	Lines
10 pt	4972	4283	697	55
12 pt	3838	3311	535	46

Just to keep in mind, the average one spaced page contains usually about 3000 characters or 500 words. Depending on the text formatting a page word count may include from 200 (large print) up to 600 words (academic book).

Let’s imagine that you are freelance translator and your customer asked you to translate a file in PDF format. As usual PDF files are recognized and it is not a problem to count words in such files. Just copy the text to MS Word and perform word counting using a built-in word count engine. So, you implicitly agree on this job. But when you get this PDF file and open it, you understand that it is unrecognized. You may know that there is possible to combine in PDF both recognized text and unrecognized images. Let’s imagine also that unfortunately you didn’t agree with your customer that for scan jobs you are paid on a per hour basis and therefore your customer demands job to be done on a per word basis.

So, you need to count words in this PDF file in any ways. How can you perform this? There are two methods to count words in PDF file: free of charge and paid…

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With the use of specialized word count tools giving the possibility to count words and numbers separately, the charge for the numbers in source text is being discussed.

Although it may seem obvious that translators “do nothing with the numbers”, there are still situations when numbers add some very thorough work for translators:

1.   When numbers are to be translated (for example, change 123 to one hundred twenty-three)

2.  When numbers are to be checked or proofread, especially concerning large number massive

 

So if you are thinking on whether to include the numbers in your paid word count, just estimate your effort spent on them first.

As I stated in my previous post, I wanted to investigate the statement that word usually shows less word count results than other word count tools. So I ran a little experiment … and you are welcome to share the results with me.

Data:

We have two MS Word documents, 1 with plain text and 1 with different text objects included.

I decided to use 3 tools for quick word count evaluation: MS Word Statistics, online word count tool and a specialized word count tool.

Stage 1: Plain Text

Please follow my results on the screenshots below.

Total of 330 words

 

 

 

 

 

Total of 328 words

 

 

 

 

 

Total of 330 words (including 2 numbers)

 

 

 

 

Conclusion: the only word count difference is made by numbers. There are two of them in text, but I guess the translation client wouldn’t want to pay for them as for words if there are more.

 

Stage 2: Text+ different text objects (my document included text boxes, WordArt object, Shape, footers, headers and an embedded Excel table)

 

Total of 707 words (the possibility of counting textboxes, footnotes and endnotes in new MS Word versions is completely new to me)

 

 

 

 

Total of 431 words (see, it is supposed to be table in stead of white space)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Total of 865 words (including 28 numbers)

 

 

 

Conclusion: 707/431/865. Indeed, MS Word shows less word count results than specialized word count tool, but more than online word count engine.

As a translator, you will be paid

…very little according to online word count.

… more for 28 numbers, but underpaid for 130 words in text objects according to MS Word Statistics.

… according to the accurate word count in specialized word count tool.

 

General conclusion: if you work with plain text only and don’t care for the numbers, you may sure rely on any of the word count tools. But if your document is more complicated than that – well, the decision is up to you.

 

Those are my results. Maybe I should have included something else? Tell me

An experienced word count user may already have noticed that there can be slight and even substantial differences in word count results produced by different word count engines. Surprised? Let’s find out what is the reason for that.

Currently there are no rules or system defining what instruments or scheme should be used for word count and different word count tools use their own schemes for word count. And the most important question here is what to count. Well, words, obviously, but it appears that different programs include different meanings in this single object.

Microsoft Word Statistics, the most common unspecific word counting instrument, considers everything between two spaces a word, be it a number or a symbol. On the other hand, Word doesn’t include in its word count statistics the text in text boxes or shapes, that may sometimes happen to add a significant number of words to your word count.

The specific word count tools are more accurate here. Usually, a user can define whether to count numbers or not and whether to include the text from additional objects to the word count statistics. The best word count tools are usually armed with word count opportunities in footers, headers, notes, footnotes, end notes, text boxes, shapes,  text in embedded and linked documents, comments and hidden text. Also they can provide the word count in a large number of file formats. For example, AnyCount counts text in 36 file formats!

It is also said that because of these differences the word count produced by specific word count tools usually scores more words/units than word count in Microsoft Word. But I guess I’d like to find that out myself and do some research on the matter. So just look forward to it!

It’s nice not to be limited in word count and write whatever you are up to just as you do on your personal blog or in your diary. But what if your absolutely perfect article doesn’t meet the word count limit set up by the editor? It seems that you have it all linked together, but your editor won’t buy it.  So there is what you can do here

1. Make sure all the information is essential

If you have several points of view, find out if they are all equally important.

2. Join the sentences

Try joining sentences you think could be joined.

3. Cut the introduction

It is not the most important thing you have to say, is it?

4. Get rid of the scenery

Don’t be overly descriptive. When your heroine is “breathtakingly beautiful”, ideas “unbelievably outstanding” and the sky is “sparkling-blue”… Well, there is a risk your word count would be “absolutely and roughly violating the word count limit”

5. Consider the quotes

Although your speakers are worth quoting, maybe there is a chance to say it all in a couple of words without loosing the idea.

6. Use graphics

See if there are some points you can SHOW in stead of explaining.

7. Make sure your word count is accurate

Check your word count units (words, lines or characters, etc). If you have many text boxes or embedded documents, you may need the word count tool to make sure you meet the limit.

And if you already are a successful text-count-cutter, please share your own tips.

Word count: 254

With the winning march of Google as a search engine over the planet search engine optimization became a milestone activity for many of the corporate webmasters. Lots of companies helping businesses to climb on top of the search emerged in last 10 years.

But with the development of SEO people started to mix 2 essential content parameters — word count and frequency count. It’s pretty strange, since mixing them is like mixing time and distance in the speed formula.

Word count – is the total quantity of meaningful words (excluding tags) in the piece of text.

Frequency count – is the index of how many times a word or a phrase appears in the in the piece of text.

You can find an example of a classic frequency counter here and a word count tool here.

From the first look you may think that frequency counter outbeats word count software in functionality, because it counts both words and statistics. But if you put a tagged text into a frequency count tool you will disappointed to find that all the tags were also included into the word and frequency count.

So if you need to count the quantity of the meaningful words (excluding all the tags) to know the volume of the job done in the majority of the text and even graphics formats, you need a word count tool. However if you are writing a SEO optimized content and want to know, whether you have put enough keywords into it, you’ll need a frequency count web app.

I do love ski-tech and all the new opportunities driven by progress. Web helps the art and literature evolve. Some 30 years ago every writer was isolated during the creative process. If an author wanted to cooperate with another one, it doesn’t matter how – learn from him or write a book together, they had to gather in one place and work from a single location.

But with interactive blogging the situation changed. Both private and publicly shared blogs stared providing the cooperation ground for writers at all levels. And how is all this related to the word count?

Well, everybody who tried writing something knows that having a general idea is one thing and writing at least an A4 a day is another. All writers, both beginners and masters, need writing discipline. So a group of guys, who “wants to improve their writing and like building web apps” built a perfect discipline training tool called Word Count Journal.

The idea is simple – first day you write 1 word, second day – 2, and at the end of the year you have 66,795 words (in case you write only what you have to and not more). Like guys say: “Little by little, through the power of series, the total of your written words will add up to more words than contained in the average novel.”

I do like the idea. Just think it over once again – word count of your everyday creative output trains you to write a page of unique content per day till the end of the year. By simply following the rule of writing 1 word more every next day you can become a commercial blogger, journalist or a prominent writer in the next 365 days.

I made my start here and today have exceeded the planned word count 21 times. Feel free to join the initiative and leave a link to your own journal in comments to this post, so we can exchange the ideas and become more prominent writers and word counters

All my previous posts were related to the Windows-based word count software, but I thought that it is pretty unfair to forget about millions of UNIX users, so today we have a UNIX word count session.

Of course my UNIX experience is not that huge (it was all about testing a Fedora core under virtual machine), so below you will find mostly the reprints of the word count tips published in other Internet-media.

Word count using the “wc” command (taken from Wiki)

“wc” (short for word count) is a command in Unix-like operating systems. The program reads either standard input or a list of files and generates one or more of the following statistics: number of bytes, number of words, and number of lines (specifically, the number of newline characters). If a list of files is provided, both individual file and total statistics follow.

This is how to use the “wc” command:
• wc -l print the line count
• wc -c print the byte count
• wc -m print the character count
• wc -L print the length of longest line
• wc -w print the word count

Well, taking into consideration the languages that don’t use space mark, byte count will be very much appreciated by users from China, Japan and Thailand.

Word count without using the “wc” command (taken from computing.net)

After user Gburg inquired how to execute a loop to count each word in a file individually, without using the wc command, the following reply followed:

You can use the script below if your words are space seperated.

#!/bin/ksh
typeset -i I=0
{ while read line
do
for wort in `echo $line`
do
I=$I+1
done
done } < $1
echo $I

Many thanks to user Frank from everybody, except users from China, Japan and Thailand, for whom the script there should be another script

That's basically all for UNIX word count today.

P.S. Fans of the open source platforms will definitely like this video. Even such a Windows guy as me liked the trick