Tutorial: one combined count or two separate counts?

In these tagged word cards, an occurrence has one PartOfSpeech value, so Noun and Verb are mutually exclusive labels. Counting Noun OR Verb gives 28. Two separate IF statements that both increase the SAME Count also give 28 here because a card cannot pass both tests.

Ncount = 0
Vcount = 0
for each word card X:
    if X.PartOfSpeech == "Noun":
        Ncount = Ncount + 1
    if X.PartOfSpeech == "Verb":
        Vcount = Vcount + 1
# Ncount = 21, Vcount = 7

Now consider the wrong rewrite: IF Noun OR Verb, increase Ncount AND increase Vcount. Every noun then increases the verb counter, and every verb increases the noun counter. Both counters become 28. Keeping two counters means the updates must remain connected to the correct conditions.

These counts are word-card occurrences, not distinct spellings. A word may appear several times in the paragraph. In general English a spelling can have different grammatical roles in different sentences; our exclusivity claim is about the single label stored on each particular card.