Another way to count words in ClarisWorks or MacWrite II is not with Spell Check but with Find/Change. Here are the steps:
1. Choose Find/Change from the Edit menu.
2. Type a space in the Find section and a space in the Change section.
3. Click the Change All button.
4. Click Okay to the message "The Change All feature is not undoable".
5. The next dialogue box that appears will have a count of how many spaces were changed to spaces and should correspond to the number of words in your document.
If you entered double spaces after every period then ADD the following steps to count your words more accurately:
6. Type a period in the Find section and a period in the Change section.
7. Click the Change All button.
8. Click Okay to the message "The Change All feature is not undoable".
9. The next dialogue box that appears will have a count of how many periods were changed to periods and should correspond to the number of double spaces in your document.
10. Subtract the number of periods changed from the number of spaces changed.
* You may want to backup your file the first time you try this method since you cannot Undo the Change All feature.
If you are going to do this regularly, you may want to upgrade to MacWrite Pro. MacWrite Pro can provide full statistics on your document (word count, paragraph count, modification dates, revision number, etc.)
Also, if you convert spaces to returns, you can import the file into a database and get average word length, a real word count, count the number of "I's", "you's", "and", etc.