Count the words

Have you ever had to submit a written document which required a certain number of words to be written?

In school we were always given assignments such as “write two hundred words on Lincoln” or “write a five hundred word paper on the Reformation”. I remember writing the assignments and spending half the time just counting the words trying to add an extra word here and there so that the paper would come out to be the exact number of words. Back in those days we didn’t do our assignments on computers as they do now and we certainly didn’t have tools which would count the words for us.

In today’s world we can write a piece on a computer and the computer will keep track of how many words we have typed and in some cases we can see the number of words as we type. For instance I have written 184 words so far in this piece, and I know it because the MS Word version that I am using shows me the total at the bottom of the page. However it does not show me the number of characters and on some web sites we are limited to the number of characters we type not just the words we type, so we need a tool that will keep track of words and characters.

Well, while cleaning up my files I came across a link to a tool which not only gives me the number of words but also the number of characters. The web site link is: Counting Words and Characters in One Step

As I recall, I came across the “One Step” web site by Stephen P Morse, a couple of years ago and captured some of the links to various tools and put them in various text file so that I could use them later. I haven’t had to use this particular tool in all those years so it has just been sitting there waiting for me to find it again.

An interesting thing about finding this link is that when I tested it to see how it worked, I instinctively typed “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.”

I have not used that phrase in over fifty years. I remember typing that out in tenth grade typing class on the “new” Selectric typewriters

I thought I would share the link with you the readers of this blog because maybe one of you will need a tool like this when you are writing your own blogs.

Thank You.