Reading the chart
Each bar is one sentence, in the order you wrote them. Its height is the number of words. The colours mark four bands:
- green, under 15 words
- blue, 15 to 24
- amber, 25 to 34
- red, 35 or more
The dashed line is your average. Click a bar, or a sentence in the list of longest sentences, to select that sentence in your text.
A healthy chart for most prose looks uneven: short and medium bars with an occasional tall one. A row of bars all the same height reads as monotonous, even if each sentence is fine. A cluster of red bars is where readers will slow down or lose the thread.
The numbers
- Average. Words per sentence. Plain-language guidance often suggests an average of about 15 to 20 words for general readers.
- Median. The middle sentence length. If it is much lower than the average, a few very long sentences are pulling the average up. Fix those first.
- Shortest and longest. The extremes.
- Variety (standard deviation). How much your lengths vary. Close to zero means every sentence is about the same length. Between about 5 and 10 is common in readable prose.
- 25 words or more. The share of long sentences. The editor marks these with a yellow background, and a darker one at 35.
How sentences are split
A sentence ends at a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis followed by a space and a capital letter, a digit or a quote. Abbreviations like “Dr.” and “e.g.”, initials such as “J. R. R.” and list numbers do not end a sentence. A heading or list item on its own line counts as its own sentence. Lines that start in lowercase are treated as the same sentence continuing, so text copied from an email with hard line breaks is not chopped up.
Semicolons and colons do not end sentences, so a sentence held together with semicolons will show as one long bar. That is usually fair: readers have to hold it all in mind at once.
How do I shorten a long sentence?
Look for the point where the idea turns: “and”, “but”, “which”, “because”, a semicolon. Split there and give each half its own subject and verb. The guide How to write shorter sentences shows the common fixes with before-and-after examples.
Should every sentence be short?
No. Short sentences hit hard, but a page of them sounds clipped. Vary the rhythm and save your longest sentences for ideas that read as a list or a sequence. See average sentence length.