Text Statistics Analyser

In short A full text readout answers several questions at once that are usually asked one at a time: how long the text is in words, characters, sentences and paragraphs; how hard it is to read; and what its vocabulary looks like. The most useful figures are the ones nobody thinks to ask for. Average sentence length drives readability more than any other single number. Lexical density — the proportion of content words to total words — separates writing that carries information from writing that carries mostly structure, and academic prose runs high while conversation runs low. Unique word count against total word count shows repetition, and a low ratio in a long piece usually means a section is circling rather than progressing. The longest words are worth reading as a list, because they are where the jargon collects. None of these numbers is a verdict. They are a way of finding the two paragraphs that need attention in a piece too long to reread carefully, which is the actual problem most editing faces.