February Updates and Notes Form word count issue

In 2016, someone else had the same issue and posted about it here. Despite my word count being below 250 (248), the form told me that “Your updates exceed the allowed length - please edit your response.”
To be able to submit, I reduced my word count to 243 and took out dashes that weren’t attached to words, either replacing them with semicolons or attaching them to words ([word- word] instead of [word - word]).
My conclusion is that either the word count is secretly 243 exactly for some reason (244 words didn’t work) or that the form counts certain dashes or punctuation as words. I don’t think that there is a hard character limit because I put paragraph indentations back in and it worked and the person with this issue in 2016 had a higher character count than I did.
Good luck to anyone else having this issue.

Omg that happened to me! I had to shorten mine from 250. It was sooo frustruating