Is this causing some sort of problem for you, or does it merely bother you?

Mostly the latter, haha.

In any case, I don’t really notice any impact on performance so I’m going to let it go. Here is my final script that I ended up writing for those that come along and want to see it.

from re import findall

def callback_sci_UPDATEUI(args):
    SPEECH_SEC_PER_WORD = 0.66 # 0.55 = fast, 0.66 = normal, 0.75 = paused
    if editor.getTextLength() < 100000 and args['updated']:  # don't search "big" files
        if editor.getSelections() == 1 and not editor.getSelectionEmpty():
            # show word count for selection
            text = editor.getSelText()
            sel_info = ' (For Selected)'
        else:
            # show word count for entire document
            text = editor.getText()
            sel_info = ''
        word_count = len(findall(r'\w+', text))       
        speech_minutes = (word_count * SPEECH_SEC_PER_WORD / 60) % 60
        speech_seconds = (word_count * SPEECH_SEC_PER_WORD) % 60
        speaking_time_str = "%02dm%02ds" % (speech_minutes, speech_seconds)
        sbar_value = 'Words: {}  Speaking Time: {}{}'.format(word_count, speaking_time_str, sel_info)
        notepad.setStatusBar(STATUSBARSECTION.DOCTYPE, sbar_value)

editor.callback(callback_sci_UPDATEUI, [SCINTILLANOTIFICATION.UPDATEUI])

I couldn’t really find good documentation

I suppose this is the bible of documentation for it: https://www.scintilla.org/ScintillaDoc.html#Notifications

I do realize that some of the notifications fire “a lot”. But in practice, I typically just ignore that and let my callbacks do their duty, no matter how redundant. Is this causing some sort of problem for you, or does it merely bother you?

Perhaps you can cut down on some of the “noise” by using: https://www.scintilla.org/ScintillaDoc.html#SCI_SETMODEVENTMASK

Yeah I tried SCINTILLANOTIFICATION.MODIFIED but it actually fired a lot more than SCINTILLANOTIFICATION.UPDATEUI.

For example, just just one keystroke would call the function three times. Same with SCINTILLANOTIFICATION.KEY which would call it 2 times IIRC - though maybe its firing on key up and key down? I couldn’t really find good documentation or examples relating to SCINTILLANOTIFICATION.

For example, args with SCINTILLANOTIFICATION.UPDATEUI contains 'updated': 2 which seems to correspond to the type of action 'updated': 1 and 'updated': 3 being keystroke or backspace and 'updated': 2 being click. How does one figure out what number corresponds to what action?

Here is what I have so far, which updates on every click, selection and key input…SCINTILLANOTIFICATION.UPDATEUI

Well “update ui” IS going to fire everytime the UI needs updating, hence its name. :-)

Perhaps SCINTILLANOTIFICATION.MODIFIED is better?
That one fires when text content of the editor buffer is changed.
It still may occur more times than you’d expect, but I would say have a look into it.