When I reached another milestone in this NaNoWri project this morning, I decided to upgrade my profile on their website. I’d heard about the problem with Word’s wordcount from somewhere, but was reminded when I went to the NaNo site. For some reason, Word beefs up the wordcount up to 30%.

This isn’t an issue if you’re writing simple business letters or reports. But it’s a major issue for writers, who rely too heavily (like me) on the program’s wordcount feature. Accuracy is key when submitting short stories and manuscripts to editors and publishers.

There is a manual formula for determining your story’s wordcount, but I avoid math as much as possible. Plus, I’m lazy. I’d much rather have the word processor do it so I can write.

The best word processing program I ever owned was WordPerfect. It ran great on my Mac Performa (long gone now). I stopped using it when my oldest son joined Cub Scouts, and I needed Word to read the documents that the committe emailed to me. Corel has since discontinued WordPerfect for the Mac, which forced me to use Word.

Although I haven’t had the problems others have had with Word, I’m tired of it. I don’t use it for anything other than a typewriter because the graphics and interface suck (especially the Help section). The best thing I can say about Word is that it is able to handle long documents.

I tried a cheaper program called Nisus way back in 1998, but it didn’t take too well to my large manuscript. That was why I bought WordPerfect. Just today, I was surfing the Internet and found a newer version called Nisus Writer Express 2.5.

I love the floating palette interface. Everything is very straightforward. However, when I tried to copy and paste the first eight chapters of Prosperity into one file, the double-spaced formatting changed to single for no apparent reason. I’ll have to investigate this later.

Another program I found was Mellel. What impressed me was a testimonial from an author who said that he was able to type an 80,000-word manuscript with this program. So, now the trial version of that is now sitting on my desktop. :)
The interface is a bit more elaborate than Nisus but very clean. They also have good user documentation, which is rare. I’ll be testing that one out this week as well.

Enjoy the rest of your day!

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