Track your daily words with this website

George Burns once said, “No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.”

Here at OneWildWord we often write about the power of words. We know that one word can begin an entire avalanche of words.

But sometimes, even getting down a single word can be a challenge. 

So, in my ongoing struggle to carve time out of my day for my writing and keep myself accountable, I started using a free service that Carly wrote about last year. At www.750words.com, the goal is to simply write 750 words per day. You receive points for each day you accomplish this goal and points for going over 750 words.

To learn how the site works, please read Carly’s post, “Write Your Book 750 Words at a Time.”

Besides keeping myself accountable, the site allows me to track such things as average words per day, average number of minutes it takes to write 750 words, words per minute, average number of distractions, and streaks—my longest period of consecutive days written.

You can write your words directly on the site or in any word-processing program of your choice, then cut and paste them into 750 words—it scrambles your words so it’s one hundred percent private.

For fun, you can also track other things based on the words you write: emotions such as affectionate, upset, anxious, or self-important; concerns like family, death or relationships; and word usage—you can see your average score for adverbs, conjunctions, quantifiers and other parts of speech. All of these features also give you the world’s averages as well as your own.

Mostly, I use the site for tracking my word count but the other features can be eye-opening. Yesterday, for example, I realized that I used far too many adverbs—that’s okay for a first draft but just being aware of this can help me avoid them in the future.

Currently, www.750words.com is free, though I think the plan is to begin charging $5 a month beginning in April. This will help the owner defray costs and keep the site up and running. Now is a great time to check it out. Join me for the free March challenge—you can also follow other 750 worders on the site.