How are words counted?

[LauraD]

Hi everyone! I'm a newbie; apologies in advance for asking a stupid question. I'd like to know what Constant Content considers to be the way that we should count words in an article. In typing class, we were taught to count the number of characters and divide that by 5. Someone else uses Microsoft Word's built-in word counter, which considers each unique word, long or short, to be equal to one word (it just counts based on the spaces between words). For the articles I'm working on, there can be a 200 or more word difference in word count between these two methods! What are Constant Content and our customers expecting?

Sorry, there was a question similar to this, but no clear answer arose out of the discussion and the topic was closed to new replies/questions.

Thanks in advance for your help!

[stelle]

I use MS Word's count. It would take you ages to count all of the characters on a page!

[LauraD]

Actually, MSWord includes the numbers of characters on the Properties-->Statistics page, also, so it wouldn't take but a second to divide that by 5 (or whatever). Very handy. (It's what I'm used to using, at least.)

[Lysis]

If you have Word, I would use it as the word counterer.

I only say that, because I've been in the game for a while and I will tell you that at some point you will anger someone if you advertise a certain word count and the actual count is less than what you advertised even if it's only a few words. Even if it's 5 words less, I'm pretty sure at some point you will anger a customer. I know it sounds crazy, but after so many years writing content online, some people want every word they pay for. There is one place I write (content mill) where they will send back an article for one word. It's happened to me a couple times there. I've gotten revision requests to add one or two words. Crazy, but that's the way it is in the content writing world.

So anyway, if you want to save yourself from that incident, you should just use Word's word count system.

[LauraD]

Eek! Now I'm scared! Yes, definitely I'll have to use Word's word-counting system. (The problem is, I usually use more long words and write longer articles, so I'm penalized a lot by it.) I definitely don't want to make anyone angry, though, so I'll use Word's standard method.

[LauraD]

Constant Content should really post that that is "the standard method for counting words" (or whatever they want to be the standard method, post that) someplace where writers and buyers can both see it, though. That would avoid confusion for sure.

I've used several other word counters (including http://www.wordcounter.net, which also lists keyword density for the top 10 keywords) and gotten various other results, too. I think MSWord gets confused by hyphens on at least the Macintosh operating system which I use. Also, owning Microsoft Word would then become a requirement of all writers on the site, and I know a lot of anti-Microsoft people who refuse to use MSFT products who still produce .doc and .rtf files just fine from whatever alternative software they're using: the word counts might be different in those alternative software applications, however, if they don't screw up the hyphens.

I'm just babbling, but I think specifying exactly what's counted to users and buyers would be best; and if MSFT Office Word's count is required then we'd all better be using it to at least count the words (quirks and all).

[Lysis]

Not sure how other writers do it, because I use Word. And yeah, Word counts a hyphenated word as one word. I have no idea if that's the way it's supposed to be, because I'm not a writer. I just play one sometimes. lol

[LauraD]

LOL I play a writer more often than I should, sometimes.