I do lots of rewriting. Scrivener only keeps net words written - new words minus deleted words - in history. I’d like to have total words written, regardless of how many words are deleted. Seems like this is an easy add since the program keeps track of both, but only displays net, not gross.
Is there an easy workaround? Or is this a feature request?
Hi.
It is not that simple. As it has been asked for many times before, should it be that easy to program, it’d be already implemented. (Note that this is my understanding, as a user. I am no developer of the software.)
Scrivener / writing history, doesn’t actually keep track of deleted words.
It only compares the total from one day to the next.
If the total words difference is a minus, then it looks like it tracked deleted words, but it didn’t.
. . . . . . . . .
One thing you could do is use strike-out rather than delete.
Once done working on your text (and happy you got a number that reflects your newly written words), there is a function to remove strike-out text from your documents.
Otherwise, as an advice I would say trust your feeling. You should know if you’ve done what you had to do or not. Whether you have given your best or not shouldn’t be decided by a number – you should know, plain simple.
Again, that is just my take on the matter. But ever since I stopped caring for the word count, not only do I write just as much or more, but I am in a better state of mind vis-à-vis the task at hand.
(I write fiction novels, for the difference it could make.)
While I get where you’re coming from, I’d still like to have total words written, regardless of how many words are deleted. I’ve been writing professionally for 20 years, and using Scrivener for the last eight years, so please trust this is a considered request from an experienced writer and user.
Why? In my experience, writing is rewriting. Since I spend most of my time rewriting - - the total words written metric is more relevant to my workflow than net words.
From a programming perspective, it seems like a subroutine that puts tics up a counter when a character space combination is entered and displayed when the statistics function is invoked would do the trick without much overhead. That’s speculation on my part, but I don’t need absolute accuracy, much as the current statistics function offers estimates [fast] and accuracy [slower] options.
If, as you mentioned, this feature has been requested a number of times before, maybe its priority needs to be raised. I’m not an outlier.
In the meantime, perhaps you could search for a third party app.
I know I’ve seen apps that run in the background and that count words typed anywhere. (I guess they mostly count spaces and carriage returns as words, but the result is the same. And they don’t “see” the text, they have no clue what is deleted.)