This is a motivational request. Often when I am working on revisions, my word count tends to stay relatively the same as I rewrite. However, I am making a lot of changes while working on my manuscript.
I was trying to think of a way to show progress without just being “word count” as my current metric. It had me wondering if maybe each day, Scrivener watches how many words change over time and give a “word change” score. This includes any words removed, any words added, as a sum. I realize that can add up quickly (since any changed word = remove+add), but I thought this might be a good motivational tool for people to see they are making progress when past the initial first pass of writing.
Hi.
This has actually been asked for a couple of times in different forms and shapes.
This would force Scrivener to be monitoring everything one does to a project. Or something like that. I think that technically, it’d be conflictual with the way the app works.
Meanwhile, a solution :
Find yourself a keyboard tracker app. (I’m sure there are free ones out there.) Such an app runs in the background and blindly counts all words typed anywhere.
Start it at the beginning of your session. At the end it’ll tell you how many words you typed.
And then if you compare that with your project’s Writing History, you’ll know how many are new words (from the History report), and : your keyboard tracker score minus the new words = edits.
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Another way is to use strikethrough instead of deleting words.
So these “deleted” words are still counted.
Then, later : Edit / Text Tidying / Delete Strike-Through Text
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You could also have a blank document as a project bookmark, and paste into it everything you now delete by rather using Ctrl-X.
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Should this be one day implemented, I think the best way to go about it would be to implement such a keyboard tracker, plus the math operation described above (tracker - new words = edits), so that the user gets such a wordcount report of edits.
I think a keyboard tracker internally is the way to go, it doesn’t have to be complicated, and it would be bound by the manuscript you are currently editing (so it’s context sensitive). Maybe even just tracking new words that you type makes the process even more simplistic and still mostly tracks changes (other than deletions). And yes, a generic keyboard tracker could do this. I just thought it would be a neat built in metric to add to the words per day which is relative to a single entire word count value snapshot it seems (since you can easily go negative).
For me, time doesn’t really tell me anything about what I’ve done as I can spent forty minutes on a single paragraph or fifteen minutes on an entire chapter (you know, when I’m lucky, haha).
I ended about four hours of revision the other night at was at a negative number for daily word count. I know I did a lot of revision, so I found myself curious about how much I changed.