I agree – there is complexity. Complexity being the mother to both simplicity and sophistication. Technical issues aside, there could be as many ways of measuring “progress” as there are Scrivener users.
What I’m saying is that with finer detail tracked and presented in the category of word count it would allow each of us, whatever word-standard of progress we rely on, to get a measurement closer to the mark. As Keith noted, this would be particularly tricky if a user measured progress in terms of characters.
I’m currently in the process of revising a story and need a way to keep track of the new words I’m writing/editing. I currently use Ulysses and honestly love it, but if Scrivener has the capacity to show stats on daily/session word count without deleted words affecting it, I would likely switch.
Remember snapshots. If do one before revise and label and do second after revision can rollback or compare. If compare see both additions and subtractions between two points in time in editing process. That may be what you want as well as using revision mode. Try it with next scene and see
@redblue I believe the way to accomplish what you want in Scrivener would be to use strikethrough during an editing session for text you mean to delete. That way, the text is still all there to be counted, so your working count always goes up. At the end of the day, or whenever, you can invoke a Scrivener command which removes all the struck-through text.
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?
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.)
I’d like to track my efforts during revisions, but the way the word count doesnt show the number of words added vs words deleted, I can only rely on strikethrough text to get this summary. Is there another way to see this?
You’re correct that Scrivener’s standard word count only shows the current total for a document or selection, not a breakdown of words added versus deleted. There isn’t a built-in feature to track net changes automatically.
The best approach is to use Snapshots:
Take a snapshot of your document before revising (Document ▸ Snapshots ▸ Take Snapshot).
After editing, take another snapshot.
Select both snapshots in the Snapshots list and hit Compare to see what text has been added or removed.
This is visual rather than numeric, but it gives a clear view of changes.
If you want a rough numeric comparison, you could also copy the text from each snapshot into a new document, note the word counts, and compare them to see net additions or deletions.
I’ve moved your post to the existing discussion thread for this request (along with several others, to clean this discussion up and have it all in one area). As noted above, there are no plans to add anything like that, and indeed the concept itself is problematic once you start getting into the specifics of what that actually means. Scroll up to find more discussion.
I would add that strikeout is quite well supported these days, as there is a compile flag to automatically remove such text, and a menu command to physically strip them out once you are ready to say goodbye for good.
