Blergh...

[tassie_gal]

post submission PhD.  Thought I was successfully recovering and doing the OMG ITS UNDER EXAMINATION denial thing quite happily while working dead end job that requires little brain skill but lots of grunt.  Until Friday.  Get message on phone from supervisor, apparently one of the examiners wants a word count.   Ok, fine - I do it.  Now I am doing

Comments

[max_ambiguity]

OMG, I'd freak out. Here's the thing: Microsoft Word is known to undercount documents by up to 20%. It happens in documents where certain words like "research," "study," or "acknowledgements" are used - something about those particular combinations of letters it can't handle. So the ONLY way to get an accurate word count is to do it manually.

Sucks to be you.

[tassie_gal]

eh, its done now. And given MS Projects propensity to miscalculate end dates the information supplied above would not suprise me!

[perpetua_redux]

YASM

[aryanhwy]

Not the only way. Make a plain-text version of it (by your favorite method) and use the linux command wc -w. If your plain-text version happens to include LaTeX formatting (as mine did), this will probably overestimate some, depending on the amount of mark-up used, but I've found that the result it gives is always close enough.

Word-count was something that never entered my head while writing my dissertation (my goal was 5 chapters at 20 pages a piece, the result was 7 chapters, 3 appendices, and 251 pages), but with all the comments here I got curious. The result of wc -c on the three files that made up my dissertation gets me 87,583. Cool.

[sensaes]

You're being a pair of buttocks. But not as big a pair of buttocks as someone who ripped off their thesis, and doesn't give a sh*t. *Cough*Saif Gaddafi*Cough*.

Feel better.

[chasbrown]

Word counts? What are those? Why does noone work in page counts?

[max_ambiguity]

Yeah, why aren't page counts the most accurate way to do it?

[tassie_gal]

Thanks everyone for the laughs. Feel much better now!