Often while writing, I need to move a large chunk of text around the page by copying it, cutting it, then pasting into another location on the page. But it seems there’s no way to prevent the wordcount target from counting those texts as new. There’s nothing in the options I can find that prevents this. Help?
Project Targets>Options>Session Target. Make sure ‘Allow Negatives’ is ticked. Now the cut as well as the paste will be counted 
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Ah, I thought I’ve seen that option before but couldn’t find it again. Thanks for reminding me!
Now I feel conflicted. Because if I turn that option on, then it won’t accurately count the words I did write in that session. For example if I wrote 500 words, but cut 1,000 words, it’ll say I wrote -500 words that session. I mean it works for project word count, but not for individual writing sessions.
I hear you! Keeping track of words written is good motivator.
You could cut and paste all the deleted stuff into a separate folder/file within the project, note down your word count at the end of the day, and then delete it. Or move it outside the Manuscript or into a discarded project like I do. I NEVER delete anything. So much I’ve removed from my current WIP has ended up in other WIPs.
I also keep track of individual chapters in a spreadsheet, updating it at the end of the day so even if I’ve removed a fair amount I can still see the gains in other areas of the book.
You can try learning the strike-through keyboard shortcut, if available on Windows, so that you can just mark text that you want to delete without actually reducing your word count. You can also just select text and turn it into an inline annotation, which still affects word count.
Both struck-through text and inline annotations have a check box in the compile window that lets you strip them out of the resulting file, so you never have to worry about forgetting to delete all of the text that you marked for exclusion.
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