Historical and projected word counts

Scrivener Wish List
1

I really like the project targets and it’s progress bars, I have been surprised by how much it helps me.

What would be great, would be a historical log of word count against date and even better two projected series of word counts for future dates (including a date at which the target word count is projected to be hit based on the target per session :smiley: and one based on the actual historical increases in word count :neutral_face: .)

A simple graph of this would be even more awesome.

Many thanks.

2

I don’t speak for the development team, but I think this might lie outside the scope of Scrivener. It’s a writing application, not a project planning and productivity management application.

Katherine

3

Hi Katherine,

Many thanks for your reply, I take your point, but I think the stats are really important for novel writers in particular. REALLY important, far more so than any other aspect of project management (in many cases the only aspect of project management novel writers are interested in).

I would argue the developers have already accepted that this is within their scope as they have already included overall target and session targets, what I am suggesting is only a very modest extension of this.

Best regards,

Chris.

4

Here is a somewhat recent discussion on the topic.

5

Fixed that for you.

With novels especially, for every feature that is absolutely critical to one group of writers, there is another group that hates it with the fire of a thousand suns.

Katherine

6

Hi Katherine,

Yes some of course. Though I would hazard to suggest most novel writers (if not most writers) have to take word count into account in some shape or form. It’s not like it’s in your face, you have to hunt down these stats from a menu option. Anyway I’m just casting my vote, Scrivener is way more than good enough for me as is.

7

Certainly, I don’t think anyone is suggesting that character and word counts are not essential to various fields of writing. The thing that really matters to the job of writing is what your word count is right now, and maybe what you want to achieve and how far you are from that goal. These things are all thoroughly addressed in Scrivener, in a wide variety of ways, throughout most of its views, in multiple layers of scope, because it is important. The presence of those features is not an invitation for more, but a reasonably well fleshed out concept of what should be done here (to be fair, some of that has yet to be implemented on Windows, such as calculating a daily goal based on a physical deadline).

But again, this has been discussed many times in the past, one of which was linked to, and this has already been decided as out of scope. Logging your daily activity is a personal decision. Some like it, some do not. There are great programs for doing this kind of stuff already. No need to jam everything into one software. Computers multitask for a good reason. :slight_smile: