About the Sentence & Paragraph Counter
This sentence counter looks past raw length at the shape of your writing. It reports how many sentences and paragraphs you have, the average number of words per sentence, the average number of sentences per paragraph and the length of your single longest sentence, then flags the text if the average climbs above 25 words. Those ratios predict readability far better than a word count does. The analysis runs in your browser as you type, so an unpublished chapter or a confidential report can be pasted in without any of it being uploaded.
How to use the Sentence & Paragraph Counter
- 1
Paste the passage you want to analyse into the 'Your text' box, keeping the blank lines between paragraphs intact.
- 2
Read the Structure panel for sentence and paragraph totals plus the words-per-sentence and sentences-per-paragraph averages.
- 3
Note the 'Longest sentence' figure — it is usually the one worth rewriting first.
- 4
Check the readability note underneath, which turns to a warning once your average sentence passes 25 words.
What people use it for
Editing to a plain-English standard
Public-sector and legal plain-language guidelines commonly ask for an average of 15 to 20 words per sentence. The averages here let you prove a document meets that before it goes to review.
Tightening a first draft
A single 60-word sentence can drag an otherwise clean article's average up. Spotting the longest sentence and splitting it in two often fixes the whole passage.
Balancing paragraph length for the web
Screen readers of all kinds cope badly with walls of text. A sentences-per-paragraph figure above four suggests it is time to break the block up.
How sentence boundaries are detected
The counter splits text at a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark that is followed by whitespace, and also at any line break. That rule is simple, fast and right the overwhelming majority of the time, but sentence boundary detection is a genuinely hard problem and it is worth knowing where the rule bends. Abbreviations that end in a full stop are the main source of error: 'e.g.', 'Dr.', 'Ltd.', 'Jan.' and initials such as 'J. R. R. Tolkien' each look like a sentence ending and will inflate the count slightly. Decimal numbers written as '3.5' are safe, because no whitespace follows the point. Ellipses produce a single break rather than three. Full stops that sit inside quotation marks or brackets are counted where the punctuation falls, which occasionally differs from how an editor would parse the sentence. In practice a page of ordinary prose is counted exactly; a page thick with abbreviations may read one or two sentences high, so use the averages as a guide rather than a specification.
What sentence length tells you about readability
Nearly every readability formula in use treats average sentence length as one of its two main inputs. The Flesch Reading Ease score combines words per sentence with syllables per word; the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level and the Gunning fog index do much the same with different weightings. The reason is straightforward: a reader has to hold the opening of a sentence in working memory until the verb and its object arrive, and the longer that span, the more effort comprehension takes. Newspapers written for a general audience average around 15 words per sentence. Academic journals often run past 25. The useful target is not uniformity but variation — a run of three short sentences followed by a longer one reads with rhythm, whereas eight consecutive 22-word sentences reads as a drone even though the average looks respectable. Use the average to find trouble, then read the passage aloud to decide which sentences actually need surgery.
Tips
- Paragraphs are detected by blank lines, so keep them in place when pasting from a word processor.
- Vary sentence length deliberately: a short sentence after a long one gives a paragraph its punch.
- If the count looks high, scan for abbreviations such as 'e.g.' and 'Ltd.' — each adds a phantom sentence.