Sometimes I write a lot. Sometimes I write little. Sometimes I let the emotion steers the wheel of mind and don’t write at all. Word Counter is the loupe I use to identify who is the captain of the course: emotion or me.
Anyone who’ve searched for tips to become a better writer will no doubt hear this advice: write every day. While the writing every day is oversimplified to be used as a guide, this advice does train writer to consistently churn out words disregarding their mood and emotion.
Word Counter is a menu bar app that counts the number of words you’ve written on Mac. To avoid counting frivolous words, you choose which type of apps Word Counter are active. The list of apps are not limited to text editor — if you write article on Medium, answer questions on Quora, or sharing insight on Twitter, then you can include browsers in the list.
The menu bar item shows you the breakdown of word count in each application — sorted from the highest word count to the least. The bar charts shows the number of words you’ve typed every hour of the day which you can hover to see further breakdown of the application usage at specific hour.
Take a step back to a higher place we have the calendar view that shows the word count on monthly basis. Click one of the date gives a detailed view of the word count written on that day. Just like day view, you can hover the bar chart to see the word count in each application.
Word Counter merely counts the total number of words you’ve written, but these collected data can become a good source of information to understand your habit as a writer. You can find out your most productivity hour, average daily word count, and the most effective day out of the week.
Will the Word Count Accurate?
I asked Word Counter developer, Christian Tietze, himself also an active writer, whether there is a method to track the number of words written versus the number of words deleted. Writers know that rewriting is part of the writing process, and as the result, total word count is always higher than the finished writing word count.
Christian didn’t just briefly reply to my question — he wrote a detailed post to address this concern. The answer is to separate the mental between writing and editing — you can have two different application for each mental of writing stage — but it still doesn’t answer my question to accurately measure the words output, until I read this line:
Finishing a writing project isn’t just about the typing. There is composing, and there is editing.
Indeed, writing project isn’t just about the typing. Why should I only measure the words that make it, and ignore the words that I’ve removed? Although these words I’ve corrected, removed, or deleted vanished into a shredded bits and bytes, I mustn’t forget that they used to be there — as the foundation for the rewritten words, born from the same mind, and stay on the same page.
For the limited of time you can get Word Counter at 50% price. If you’re a writer, you should get Word Counter to see if you write consistently. You might figure out that you’re not, and that’s good, because I see that as the room for improvement.