Writing community ........ What's your take on this?
So last week I was moaning about freebie word count websites on the web. If you remember one had counted 809 words and another had come up with 822. Quite a huge difference for the same writing. And if it was for a piece of work that had a maximum word count of 500 - eek!
As I said I would, I reverted to good old tallies of ten and came to 809 - hmmm, plot thickens.
Then Jeff, who is not a writer, wondered if it could be it doesn't recognise, well 'doesn't' is actually a good example. We disagreed, I argued that once the letter had been removed and an apostrophe added it became 1 word. He felt that doesn't/ wouldn't/ couldn't etc was still 2 words. I checked out his hypotheses anyway and there was exactly 13. Go Jeff!
But then he added a really valid comment, "What about your competitions, how do they add the words?"
So, I'm throwing it out to the writing community ...... Comments please :)
Doesn't = 1 word
Doesn't = 2 words
I'm not a writer but I say it's one word.
ReplyDeleteI would call it two words smashed together to be one. It's pronounced and spelled differently, so it's a separate entity from "does not".
ReplyDeleteI always go by how Word counts it, and it counts it as 1 word. I wonder if this is some of discrepancy with NaNo counts.
ReplyDelete