Page 137 - Where the Dream Ends ebook

(Second Interlude)

Word Game

George studied the screen in front of him. Fifteen hundred
words. That’s all they wanted: 1500 very nearly perfect words.
In the old days, before he owned a computer, he would have
had to count each word individually; if he wrote too much
(as he was wont to do), he would have to go back and edit.
Now, all he had to do was press a button on the Tools menu
in his word processor (MSWord) and it would tell him how
many words he had written. He knew, for example, that up
to this point he had written 95 words containing 380 charac-
ters. He didn’t really understand why anyone would want to
know how many characters there were in a document, unless
the writing was in Chinese or Japanese or some other language
where characters took the place of words or phrases. (What are

135