I’ve been having an issue with the Scrivener Word Count the entire month of November during NANOWRIMO. I’m sure I must have some setting wrong somewhere but cannot figure it out. This happens every day, but here is an example from yesterday (yes, I know NANOWRIMO is over, but I’m not through with my book yet! ):
Yesterday morning before I started writing anything the Manuscript Target was at 61,001 and the Session Target words written was at 0.
When I finished writing for the day the Session Target said I wrote 1,828 but the Manuscript Target was only at 61,822.
What happened to the other 1,007 words Scrivener said I had written and that I know I did write?
The Manuscript Target total should have been 62,829 (61,001 + 1,828), right?
The most likely issue is that the new words are not included in the current Compile group. Either they aren’t in the Manuscript folder or the document is specifically excluded from Compile.
Well, of course as soon as I posted this, I think I figured it out. If I start the day with my Session Target at 0, and my Manuscript Target running total tells me I have 61,822 words written, then I delete 500 words, the Manuscript Target rightly says I am now at 61,322 and the Session Target remains at 0. If I then add those 500 words back in, my Manuscript Target says I’m back at 61,822 but my Session Target says I’ve just written 500 new words.
To me that is inaccurate. The net number of Session Target words written should have been 0.
What am I missing? I am going to go read the manual now about the Project Statistics settings. Maybe the answer is in there?
OK. I’m sorry for all these posts but hopefully someone else will benefit from my ignorance.
I finally read through the manual and searched for “net total.” All I needed to do was click the radial labelled “Allow Negatives” in the Options area of the Targets dialog box. That allowed the Session Target to be a net total rather than just a blanket number of words typed. So now, if I delete 50 words and then add 50 words, the Session Target will read a net total of 0 instead of the total of 50 that I was getting before.
The moral of the story is if you’re going for word count for NANOWRIMO, stop deleting stuff. I made my count, though. Yeah!
When I’m trying to “win” NaNo, I use strikethrough on text I intend to delete after November. I use the Text Tidying menu to delete all of the struck-through text to get rid of it.
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