Thursday 13 October 2011

Word count shock - higher than expected

It's been a while since I've done a post about word counts. Since I moved here from Tumblr I've tried to be, you know, interesting, so there's been fewer posts about the trials of writing a PhD (which is what this blog began life as).

However, this new development is so shocking that it merits a post. I recently compiled all my comments on all my drafts, and taking a tip from Monica Macaulay's excellent Surviving Linguistics (for some reason not easy to get hold of anywhere but from the publisher), I printed them out and filed them. While doing this I added up all the word counts and it came to.... 37,774. This is astonishing, considering I would have said I had around 20,000, so I'm pretty chuffed with myself. However, I now have to write the other 40-odd thousand, so perhaps I should stop congratulating myself and get on with it.

2 comments:

  1. Thank you for recommending the book. I just ordered it. I have an MA in linguistics and am currently working on an MSc in forensic linguistics.

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  2. It's a great book; I hope you find it useful. I know I wish I'd had it sooner, it's the first book I've read that really covers what's useful to a linguist.

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