Writing Statistics
The word count in the toolbar tells you how long a manuscript is. The Statistics panel tells you three things, and they are measured differently on purpose.
Opening it
Section titled “Opening it”Click the word count in the editor toolbar. Hovering it gives you a quick preview; clicking opens the panel and keeps it there.
You can also press Mod+J (⌘J on macOS) and pick the chart icon in the sidebar rail.
Everything shown covers the manuscript you are in and everything under it — open it on a book and you get the book’s totals, open it on a chapter and you get that chapter’s.
Document — how big it is
Section titled “Document — how big it is”| Words | the count you see in the toolbar |
| Characters / Characters, no spaces | for submission requirements that ask |
| Sentences and Paragraphs | structural, not stylistic |
| Avg words/sentence | worked out from the two totals above |
| Imported | words that arrived from a .docx or Markdown file rather than being written here |
Footnotes, images and code blocks are not counted — they are not prose. Table cells are.
Sentence counting follows the language set for grammar checking, because sentence boundaries are not the same in every language. If a count looks wrong, check that setting first.
Words written — where they came from
Section titled “Words written — where they came from”Scriptorium records how each word arrived:
- Typed
- Pasted
- AI-generated — text you accepted from a rewrite or a prompt
- Dictated
- Imported — from a document you brought in
This is the only place that can tell the difference. Once text is in the document, pasted words and typed words are identical characters — the distinction is recorded at the moment of insertion or not at all.
Habits — how you write
Section titled “Habits — how you write”| Average speed | words per minute of actual writing |
| Active writing time | time spent writing, not time with the app open |
| Pauses | breaks longer than two minutes |
| Word retention | how much of what you wrote survived — a rewrite shows here even though the word count did not move |
Active time is not wall-clock time. Leaving the document open over lunch does not count as an hour of writing; the gap is recorded as a pause instead. That is what makes the speed figure mean something.
Word retention is worth understanding: it counts words added and removed without cancelling them out. Replace ten words with ten better ones and your word count does not move, but you plainly did an afternoon’s work — retention is the number that shows it.
A note on the dates
Section titled “A note on the dates”The document counts describe your text and are correct for everything you have ever written.
Words written and Habits are observations of behaviour, and they only exist from the day the feature arrived — there is no record in an older project of when or how a word was typed, so there is nothing to reconstruct them from. The panel says which date the record starts, so you always know what the numbers cover.
What is not here
Section titled “What is not here”There is no Today / This week / This month picker yet — the figures are the whole recorded history. For daily and per-session progress against a target, see Writing Goals & Sessions.