by Jillian McCoy

Created on: September 02, 2010

Online articles often require that you stick to a word count. Minimum word count requirements ensure that your article provides enough information to be useful to the reader, while maximum word counts help keep readers from getting bored. Internet readers have famously low attention spans, so paying close attention to your word count will ensure that readers can absorb everything you read. Though writing within word count requirements isn't always easy, checking on your word count is. Depending on where you write, how you check your word count may vary. Here's how to check your word count for a few of the most popular writing sources.

Word Processor

Word processors like Open Office and Microsoft Word make finding your word count simple. Find the “Tools” menu within your document's taskbar, then click on “Word Count.” If you only need to know the word count for a selection of what's within the document, highlight the text you want to count before selecting “Word Count.” This should give you the total number of words within the document, but also how many are in the portion of text you have selected.

Writing Platforms

Some blogging platforms, including WordPress, also have word count capabilities. The embedded word processor where you write (or copy and paste) your blog posts will display the total number of words within the document. For WordPress, the number of words appears below the document. This is a default feature, requiring no special themes or plugins. If you typically write your blog articles in another word processor and copy and paste them into WordPress, you may need to add a space or press Enter to make the word count appear.

Writing sites such as Helium may also include a word count feature in their article submission word processors. At Helium, the number of words shows by using the "calculator" icon on the article submission page. At some other sites, the feature may be hidden or non-existent.

Online Tools

There are also a number of online tools that will count words for you. A popular free tool is at wordcounttool.com. This tool also gives a running word count as you write, making it easy to see how your article's coming along. If you typically struggle with adhering to word counts, this may be a useful tool.

Another popular tool is Textalyser, at textalyser.net. What makes Textalyser interesting is that it does more than simply count words. This tool is ideal for writing scholarly articles and other forms of writing that don't count grammatical articles such as “the” and “a.” Textalyser automatically filters these words out, leaving you with the number of actual words your article contains. This tool also includes several other features of interest to the online article writer, such as checking keyword density.

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