Sentence Variety Analyzer
See the rhythm of your prose as a visual map.
Paste any passage of fiction or memoir. Get a visual breakdown of sentence lengths, a variety score, and a rhythm strip showing exactly where your prose goes flat.
Prose rhythm is something readers feel before they can articulate it. A page of same-length sentences creates fatigue. A well-varied passage creates momentum.
This tool visualizes the rhythm of your prose as a color-coded strip — each bar is one sentence, sized by length. It measures standard deviation as a variety score, shows your length distribution by category, and flags monotonous runs. Writers use it to find the flat spots in a passage before a workshop submission or a revision pass. Free, instant, runs entirely in your browser.
Each bar represents one sentence. Height = length. Hover for word count.
Understanding how sentence length creates pacing, tension, and music is one of the most immediately useful craft skills a writer can develop. Our courses cover it directly.
Join working writers getting weekly craft guidance, new tool announcements, and course updates from Writers' CLC in Reading, MA.
Everything runs in your browser. When you paste your work, it never leaves your device. We do not store, log, transmit, or read your writing. You own it completely, before and after you use this tool.
This tool uses rule-based pattern matching and established craft criteria, not a language model. That means the feedback is transparent, consistent, and based on principles you can look up and verify. If it flags something, you can see exactly why.
The criteria behind this tool draw from the foundational texts of the craft: John Gardner's The Art of Fiction, Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction, Robert McKee's Story, and the practical workshop traditions these works inform. The Writers' CLC instructors contributed to the criteria development.
These tools identify patterns. They do not make creative decisions. A flag is a prompt to look at a sentence more carefully, not a mandate to change it. The best use of any diagnostic tool is to notice patterns, then apply your own judgment about what serves the work.
- The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker — on sentence architecture and prose rhythm.
- The Art of Fiction by John Gardner — on sentence length and the experience of time in prose.
- Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg — the definitive argument for the short sentence.
- Writers' CLC Prose Craft Courses — workshops covering sentence-level prose technique.
