Sentence Counter

In short A sentence counter finds the boundaries — a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark followed by whitespace and a capital letter — and counts what lies between them. The hard part is not the counting but the exceptions: "Dr. Smith" and "e.g." and "U.S." all contain a full stop that ends nothing, so a naive counter reports two sentences where there is one. Common abbreviations are handled here for that reason. What the count is actually for is length. Average sentence length is the strongest single predictor of how hard text is to read, and it drives every readability formula there is. Under 14 words reads easily, 14 to 20 is normal for general writing, and over 25 becomes work for most readers — not because long sentences are wrong, but because a run of them with no short one between offers nowhere to breathe. The useful move is rarely to shorten everything: it is to find the two or three sentences that ran to forty words and break just those, which is why this tool flags the longest ones rather than just averaging.