Let me count the words

Latest versions of Word carry a little box at the bottom of the screen which counts the words as you type – no need now to go Tools → Word count. So I am, finally, learning really to ‘know’, without thinking about it, whether a piece is ‘long enough’.

It came as a bit of a shock when I found that the world of academe had adopted word length as its (in some cases very inflexible) yardstick. In my younger days it was generally a case of write as much as you can as quickly as you can. Sometimes at school one might be told to write a one or two page essay, tacitly leaving scope for suddenly finding that your handwriting had got bigger, or in some cases, lots of crossings out, just to use up the space, but in exams you judged the required length by the time available for answer.

It’s not that I didn’t have to write to a length for most of my working life, but again length was judged by the area of paper covered by standard typescript & conventional layouts– typically one or two sides of A4 or a single sheet of A5 for day to day communication, much longer for reports & submissions, though even then you judged more by rhythm & structure, never the number of words.

I found it terribly inhibiting to be given a required number of words. Not that I can’t count, or get the word processor to do it for me. I just never had a picture in my head of how long it was supposed to be in terms that I was used to.

In much the same way that I do not ‘know’ metric lengths or weights.

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