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You can't trust word counts
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- Опубликовано: 28 май 2024
- Why you can't trust word counts -- and how that can even be possible in today's word processors.
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Thanks William, Long live the Mac, Pages and Notes.
👍🙏
Yay Mac!
Love Pages, it's amazingly capable and deceptively full of features. As I said in my comment above about losing my last uni essay in Word, I couldn't wait to get out of the Windows world! Pages never lets me down. But I always back up!
Thank you, William. A salient reminder that software is a humane art, containing human foibles. We have a tendency to see software as "science" and yet all the apps we use are the result of thousands of human decisions. I have a particular dislike of Word and Windows when my last ever extended essay for university was eaten up and lost by Word about an hour before I had to hand it in. I wrote every essay close to deadline, it helps me focus, and I was getting good marks. When the all the text disappeared, and I couldn't recover it, I wasn't even angry or upset: I went into a rather calm, out of body experience from which I don't think I recovered for some days. Mortifying. I'm grateful for my tutor for giving me the benefit of the doubt. Suffice to say, my backup procedures today are extensive and I haven't used Word in many, many years!
Oh! I just pressed my hand to my chest reading that. Give me a second, I need to take some deep breaths. I remember some Microsoft guy boasting at me about how much time and money they had put into all the "Recovered Documents" stuff Word at least used to do. "Yeah, couldn't you have put that cash into NOT LOSING THE DOCUMENTS IN THE FIRST PLACE?" This is not calming me down. I need tea.
@@WilliamGallagher yeh it still leaves me cold when I think about it twenty years later😂 I was technical enough to know that Word kept (and perhaps still keeps) a number of temporary files relating to your document as well as some versions of your document (I can't remember if I had to switch that feature on or not in the first place -- or maybe this is the Recovered Documents feature you mention) and I looked all over the Windows file system and there was nothing, not even the remotest sign that I had written a word. To this day, I still don't know what happened.
@ashcross I think you’re thinking of something called something like Fast Save. Where it just kept adding to the end of the document rather than putting things in place. Which it could do because each paragraph mark contained instruction on where the next paragraph was. But it was also why I once opened a contributor’s submitted Word document and got to read all his drafts and eve a shopping list
@@WilliamGallagher Oh that rings a bell! Thank god we don't quite have all those fun and games these days! Well, fewer of them!
I am a word count nerd! I loved this discussion. Thanks, William!
I am so pleased: I was afraid it was just me. Thank you.
"I live by the word count." I loved this segment, as I use word count for motivation more than anything else. I can't decide how many words I just wrote, but you/I have decided this is O.K.
It is motivation, absolutely. Knowing that on Fridays I will tell the 58keys Patreon members how much I've written is sometimes the real kick in the backside I need to get things done.
Yeah, I understand why this topic required you calm yourself down :)
Word counts are a big deal for technical translators. We often have to deal with tags, as you explained. Which might include translatable text, such as the alt or title text in HTML. Then there are numbers, units and symbols - and no, these are usually not the easy parts you can leave unchanged. To complicate things further, there are also different methods and different weights to calculate what translation agencies call the weighted word count (e.g. counting a repeated sentence for 1/10 of the words). That's typically what a translator will get paid for. I say sentence, but defining segments is also an art, not a science.
On the other hand, I didn't expect that even the character count for a single segment could be different!
I have always deeply admired translators -- but it's always been prose and poetry ones I've thought of, it never entered my head how technical writing needs it too. That weighted word count is a horrible idea.
This is something I've thought about in passing before, but I didn't realize there was so much alchemy baked into these programs. Scrivener is my program of choice. I'll do a little in Apple Notes or Pages. But most of the time I'm using Scrivener. And after watching your video I looked it up, and apparently Scrivener counts each part of a hyphenated word as its own word. I'll have to pay more attention tonight while I'm writing.
And I _complicate_ things because of my writing style, anyway. A major part of my plotting process involves writing the story in extreme shorthand first. Not literal shorthand. Just as present tense bullet points in the actual document. That way they're right in front of my face, just below the actual prose I'm creating. And once I do the next thing, I strike it through, then cut and paste into into a different folder in the project. But this makes the word count wonky as I'm working. If I don't finish the whole chapter in a given session, the only way I know how much I've actually done is by highlighting it . . . or checking in the Project tab. But cutting and pasting to other places mangles those numbers, too, so...🤷🏻
That's exactly why I use PopClip to let me check by selecting. Which is great as long as I remember where I got to last time...
Good one!
Thank you.
I'd never noticed -- or rather, it hasn't been an issue for me so far but just did a comparison between Scrivener (236 words) vs Word for Mac (235 words).
Once you notice it, you can't stop seeing it, can you?
@@WilliamGallagher No (and I may hate you a little for that. 🙂 )
No matter what app, I seem to never get as much words written as I think I wrote 😂
Made me laugh.