I’ve really enjoyed using Scrivener for NaNoWriMo this month, and even though I didn’t ‘win’, I did pretty well at more than 37K. I plan to use Scrivener for all my serious fiction writing from now on. The ability to go easily from one part of the document to another, or from one research file to another, is priceless.
However–There is one bug that I haven’t seen in any of the lists. When I compiled and save my book to MS Word in the RTF format, I lost more than 600 words in my word count!That’s a pretty substantial difference. But when I opened the document to look at it in Word, the entire document was there.
Some word count variance issues have already been noted HERE. I had someone else with a large variance and it was because of duplicated text because they had retyped things that had “disappeared” this doesn’t sound like the case for you.
So, I have a couple questions. FIRST, do you use a large number of hyphenated words? SECOND, do you use any “splitters” to split scenes (ie ***** or ----)?
Hi Jennifer, firstly congratulations on 37,000 words for NaNo; one day I’ll get back to my novel too.
There are many ways to count words and different programs count slightly differently. Mightygitis is correct in pointing out some of the ways that programs count certain characters as words; however, it’s all very subjective at the end of the day. Scrivener for Mac and Windows count the same way. Personally, I think the way Scrivener counts is far more accurate. As an example cut and paste the following into Scrivener:
The-cat-sat *** on the mat — the end.
Scrivener counts 8 words
Ms Word 2010 counts 7 words - as the hyphenated words are counted as one, and the *** and — as words.
I have not checked how NaNo would count this; however, I believe it counts hyphenated words as one like Word?
