Is it possible to return a combined word count with wc only for certain files (like .txt files, for example) in a series of directories? 
Combined Word Count for Files in Directories
wc
With GNU wc (at least), you can combine the results of find with wcas such:find folder/ -name '*.txt' -print0 |   wc -w --files0-from=-This gives you all the power of find (a bit overkill if you just want to find all files ending with .txt to be honest) and it handles even the strangest filenames (containing newlines for example).