Maybe I’m missing something basic but I’m trying to keep track of re-write progress. Sometimes this means editing for brevity. I can get Scrivener to show me word counts by session, but if I write one paragraph to replace a longer paragraph it only shows that I have fewer words. I’d like to see something like “X words deleted / Y words added.” Is that an existing feature that I just can’t find?
No, the session counter only shows the net difference since you started the session. This may be in the negative if you are doing some cutting, or it might not move very much at all if you’re doing a mix of writing and cutting.
The problem with counting things more specifically, like you describe, is that some acts of deletion are not, in a human sense, being deleted but rather being moved. Consider if you cut a paragraph from one section and then paste it into another. With what you’re describing, we would then see what, “25 words deleted / 25 words added”? In that case, the session counter not moving at all is the most accurate reckoning. Consider all of the times you have deleted three words in the current sentence and then typed over two or three in replacement?
I think overall the problem is that the technical definitions are too literal for what would be of practical use.
1 Like