When you’re writing an essay with a word count to meet, how your word processor counts the words matters. LibreOffice seems to count a lot higher than MS Word, meaning your task at meeting the word count is much harder. This is probably because of the way it treats ‘floating punctuation marks’ like a dash with spaces on either sides as a new word. 
It even counts a single opening quote as a whole word – which can add a lot of words to your total for no benefit to your essay.
So, if possible, save your essay as a .doc Word file and open it on a friend’s computer to do a better word count. If that ‘s not possible, do a find/replace of all the opening quotes to get a better idea of how much you’ve actually written.
