Bugs Word Count Missing ~20k Words

crimson_carnation

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I've noticed that the word count for my story appears to be missing about 20,000 words. I've compared the total word count for my story here on Scribblehub with the word count in my document and also on another site, just to make sure. There is definitely a discrepancy. And since I number all the chapters and already checked to make sure that there isn't any error there, I'm certain I haven't missed posting any chapters to account for the gap.

Here is the link to the statistics page of my story: https://www.scribblehub.com/series/15679/heavenly-soul-bl/stats/

I don't know if something like this has happened to anyone else, but if it isn't inconvenient, I would really appreciate it if the issue can be fixed.
 

Rinne

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There most likely really isn't anything missing in your story.
As far as I know, that happens because SH counts contractions as a single word. I know Grammarly counts them as two words, for example. On the other hand, google docs also counts it as a single word. Never really bothered looking at how other sites and tools count the words.

So a simple "That's true." would be two words on SH and gdocs but three words on Grammarly. And contractions are very common in the English language, so they add up quite a lot. For me, it's somewhere around a 5% difference in the word count.

I don't think it's really something that needs fixing, as it is just a difference in the way you count the words. And as far as I know, many here use gdocs to write anyway.
 

crimson_carnation

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There most likely really isn't anything missing in your story.
As far as I know, that happens because SH counts contractions as a single word. I know Grammarly counts them as two words, for example. On the other hand, google docs also counts it as a single word. Never really bothered looking at how other sites and tools count the words.

So a simple "That's true." would be two words on SH and gdocs but three words on Grammarly. And contractions are very common in the English language, so they add up quite a lot. For me, it's somewhere around a 5% difference in the word count.

I don't think it's really something that needs fixing, as it is just a difference in the way you count the words. And as far as I know, many here use gdocs to write anyway.

Thank you for replying :-) I actually considered contractions and hyphenated words too, but it can maybe amount to a few hundred or thousand words. I could be wrong, but I don't think it would add up to 20k words in a story that's around 500k...

Edit: I checked, and my Word document considers both contracted and hyphenated words as a single word, so technically, there shouldn't have been a big difference between the word count in Scribblehub and my document.
 
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Rinne

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I don't have Word so I can't really comment on the why or how for it.

Regarding the difference in word count though, the difference can be that big. At least for me, it is.

A chapter of mine at around 8k on SH is around 8.5k on Grammarly. One of my newer chapters is at exactly 6000 on SH and 6448 on Grammarly.
That's even over 5%. And 5% of 500k would amount to around 25k more words, so it does sound like something that would add up. In fact, 20k sounds actually less than what I'd expect.

Hyphenated words might be another case where it's unclear but I don't really use any hyphenated words, so I can't comment how much it would make a difference. At least it follows the same rule as contractions for SH, Grammarly and gdocs.

But, since I had some time I went around and tried to look at what could cause the difference, in the process of which I found something which certainly might be called a bug. There are two other instances where SH counts two words as a single word.

First "Writing.Like.This." would count as a single word. "Writing. Like. This." counts as three.
It's really bad style, though, so I doubt that's the issue. Barely anyone who is serious about writing writes like that.

The second is similar. As you know there are two types of newlines. The one you get with a regular press of Enter and the one you get with Shift + Enter. The latter one, Shift + Enter, also does not separate the words. So the last word of a line and the first word of the next one would count as one word. I'd definitely consider these bugs that would need fixing, albeit probably low on the priority list.

Noticed that gdocs also counts a little different from SH so I tried to figure out the reason by writing a short nonsense paragraph. Worked out quite well. The difference from gdocs compared to my SH chapters was right in between SH to Grammarly. I couldn't find any other differences in word counting in the process.

Just keep in mind, 500k is massive and the times you used contractions or single newlines won't be in just a few hundred.
 

crimson_carnation

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I don't have Word so I can't really comment on the why or how for it.

Regarding the difference in word count though, the difference can be that big. At least for me, it is.

A chapter of mine at around 8k on SH is around 8.5k on Grammarly. One of my newer chapters is at exactly 6000 on SH and 6448 on Grammarly.
That's even over 5%. And 5% of 500k would amount to around 25k more words, so it does sound like something that would add up. In fact, 20k sounds actually less than what I'd expect.

Hyphenated words might be another case where it's unclear but I don't really use any hyphenated words, so I can't comment how much it would make a difference. At least it follows the same rule as contractions for SH, Grammarly and gdocs.

But, since I had some time I went around and tried to look at what could cause the difference, in the process of which I found something which certainly might be called a bug. There are two other instances where SH counts two words as a single word.

First "Writing.Like.This." would count as a single word. "Writing. Like. This." counts as three.
It's really bad style, though, so I doubt that's the issue. Barely anyone who is serious about writing writes like that.

The second is similar. As you know there are two types of newlines. The one you get with a regular press of Enter and the one you get with Shift + Enter. The latter one, Shift + Enter, also does not separate the words. So the last word of a line and the first word of the next one would count as one word. I'd definitely consider these bugs that would need fixing, albeit probably low on the priority list.

Noticed that gdocs also counts a little different from SH so I tried to figure out the reason by writing a short nonsense paragraph. Worked out quite well. The difference from gdocs compared to my SH chapters was right in between SH to Grammarly. I couldn't find any other differences in word counting in the process.

Just keep in mind, 500k is massive and the times you used contractions or single newlines won't be in just a few hundred.

Hmm, it seems there are a lot of ways word count could go wonky... :blob_hmm_two: I definitely use just the Enter key for newlines. And other than that, the only other things that could affect it are contractions and hyphenation, yes? As I said, Word counts contracted and hyphenated words as one word, which, from what's been said so far about Scribblehub's way of counting words, is exactly the same. That shouldn't be the problem then. I don't use Grammarly in the capacity where I'd be able to see its version of word count, so I don't really know how different it is. Is there anything else that might cause the difference in word count in your opinion?
 

yansusustories

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This sounds quite curious. I just went to check three of my projects and here is what came up:

Project
RMN
OMF
LWS
Scribble Hub
50k
269.8k
354k
Scrivener
50k
270k
353k
Open Office
50k
271k
355k
webnovel
50k
(not the same version)
(not the same version)
Tapas
49.1k
266.1k
(not the same version)

Now, none of these are at 500k yet (and I don't have Word and Grammarly either to check there) but if this is because of a different way of counting I would have expected a much higher difference with at least one site/program. The only one that's a bit off is Tapas but considering that the difference to SH even for OMF is only about 3-4k (at 250k+ so a bit more than half of crimson_carnation's length but not even a fourth of the difference) also not to the degree where I'd expect it to get to 20k.
Maybe a few people with longer works could have a look at whether they experience a similar difference or not? Because if nobody else does (to that degree), then maybe something might have really gone wrong with the word count on SH for crimson_carnation's project.

Anyway, even if this isn't a bug, I'd love it if somebody could shed some light on how SH does count the words considering that we have statistics for both the overall length of a project and the average word count of a chapter. And it seems that some readers care about that quite a lot so it would be nice to know for us as authors.

Edit: Since google docs was mentioned I just went to check that one too and don't get much of a difference either. it's 50k (RMN), 270.8k (OMF), and 355k (LWS). Just wanted to mention that for the sake of completeness.
 
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Tony

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I've noticed that the word count for my story appears to be missing about 20,000 words. I've compared the total word count for my story here on Scribblehub with the word count in my document and also on another site, just to make sure. There is definitely a discrepancy. And since I number all the chapters and already checked to make sure that there isn't any error there, I'm certain I haven't missed posting any chapters to account for the gap.

Here is the link to the statistics page of my story: https://www.scribblehub.com/series/15679/heavenly-soul-bl/stats/

I don't know if something like this has happened to anyone else, but if it isn't inconvenient, I would really appreciate it if the issue can be fixed.
This sounds quite curious. I just went to check three of my projects and here is what came up:

Project
RMN
OMF
LWS
Scribble Hub
50k
269.8k
354k
Scrivener
50k
270k
353k
Open Office
50k
271k
355k
webnovel
50k
(not the same version)
(not the same version)
Tapas
49.1k
266.1k
(not the same version)

Now, none of these are at 500k yet (and I don't have Word and Grammarly either to check there) but if this is because of a different way of counting I would have expected a much higher difference with at least one site/program. The only one that's a bit off is Tapas but considering that the difference to SH even for OMF is only about 3-4k (at 250k+ so a bit more than half of crimson_carnation's length but not even a fourth of the difference) also not to the degree where I'd expect it to get to 20k.
Maybe a few people with longer works could have a look at whether they experience a similar difference or not? Because if nobody else does (to that degree), then maybe something might have really gone wrong with the word count on SH for crimson_carnation's project.

Anyway, even if this isn't a bug, I'd love it if somebody could shed some light on how SH does count the words considering that we have statistics for both the overall length of a project and the average word count of a chapter. And it seems that some readers care about that quite a lot so it would be nice to know for us as authors.

Edit: Since google docs was mentioned I just went to check that one too and don't get much of a difference either. it's 50k (RMN), 270.8k (OMF), and 355k (LWS). Just wanted to mention that for the sake of completeness.


Sorry but I'm not sure if this is bugged or not at the moment. I'll have to take a deeper look into it when I can.

As for how I'm counting words, I'm just counting the spaces in between words. It's a super simple word counting feature.

On another note, thanks @yansusustories for the detailed comparison between different writing platforms!
 

yansusustories

Matchmaker of Handsome Men
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Messages
622
Points
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Sorry but I'm not sure if this is bugged or not at the moment. I'll have to take a deeper look into it when I can.

As for how I'm counting words, I'm just counting the spaces in between words. It's a super simple word counting feature.

On another note, thanks @yansusustories for the detailed comparison between different writing platforms!
If we can help by counting some other stuff, please tell us! I only went for the longer series since I thought it'd be better comparable to crimson_carnation's case. Anyway, thanks for taking a look at the matter.
 

crimson_carnation

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Messages
32
Points
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Sorry but I'm not sure if this is bugged or not at the moment. I'll have to take a deeper look into it when I can.

As for how I'm counting words, I'm just counting the spaces in between words. It's a super simple word counting feature.

On another note, thanks @yansusustories for the detailed comparison between different writing platforms!

Thank you! :-) Whenever you are able to is fine. It isn't an urgent matter anyway.

If we can help by counting some other stuff, please tell us! I only went for the longer series since I thought it'd be better comparable to crimson_carnation's case. Anyway, thanks for taking a look at the matter.

Thanks a lot for the help, Yan-jie~ :blob_melt:
 
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