Sentence Length Analyzer

How to use

1. 1Paste an essay, article, blog post, email, marketing page, or any block of writing into the input area. Click Load sample to see how the analyzer treats the famous Gary Provost passage about varied sentence length.
2. 2Read the Average sentence length and Length variety cards on the right. Average between 11 and 20 words is the readability sweet spot; variety between 0.6 and 1.1 keeps the rhythm pleasant.
3. 3Scan the Length distribution histogram to see how many sentences fall into Very short, Short, Medium, Long, and Very long buckets. Click any bar to filter the preview to that bucket.
4. 4Open the Longest sentences card to read the top five by word count. These are usually the highest-leverage targets for revision.
5. 5Use Longest first to sort every sentence by word count, or keep document order to walk through the draft top to bottom.
6. 6Click Copy report to grab a plain-text summary you can paste into an editor's email, a code review, or a writing log. Click Clear text to start over.

About this tool

Sentence Length Analyzer measures the rhythm of your writing by counting the words in every sentence and surfacing the metrics editors and writing coaches care about most. It splits the draft into sentences using the same conservative, abbreviation-aware splitter shared with the Adverb Counter, Passive Voice Checker, and Readability Score Checker so figures like 3.14, names like Dr. Smith, and ellipses like e.g. do not break the sentence boundary. Each sentence is then word-counted with a tokenizer that treats hyphenated compounds (state-of-the-art) and contractions (don't, we're) as one word, and the analyzer reports total sentences, total words, the average words per sentence, the median, the shortest, the longest, the sample standard deviation, and the coefficient of variation (standard deviation divided by mean). The coefficient of variation is the single best number for sentence variety because it stays comparable across drafts of different length: well-edited prose typically lands between 0.6 and 1.1, anything below 0.4 reads monotone, and anything above 1.1 swings widely and usually does so on purpose. Five canonical buckets (Very short 1 to 7, Short 8 to 13, Medium 14 to 21, Long 22 to 30, Very long 31+) are charted in an inline histogram so you can see at a glance whether the draft is leaning short, leaning long, or genuinely varied; clicking a bucket filters the sentence preview underneath so you can read every Very long sentence (or every Very short one) in one place. A separate Longest sentences card surfaces the top five by word count, which are almost always the highest-leverage rewrite targets for readability and for plain-language compliance. Useful for blog editors, students writing essays, technical writers preparing release notes, marketers tightening landing pages, novelists checking pacing, journalists hitting tight word counts, and anyone aiming for the Gary Provost combination of short, medium, and long sentences that gives prose its music. This is a heuristic, not a parser, so abbreviations, dialogue, lists, and creative punctuation can shift the split by a sentence or two; treat each number as a guide for revision, not a verdict. Everything runs locally in your browser, so the drafts, contracts, and unpublished copy you paste never reach a server. Pair this analyzer with the Readability Score Checker for Flesch-Kincaid, Gunning Fog, and SMOG grade-level scoring, the Passive Voice Checker for be-verb constructions, the Adverb Counter for trimmable modifiers, the Filler Word Counter for hedges and cliches, the Sentence and Paragraph Counter for totals only, and the Word Counter for live word and reading-time stats.

Free to use. Works in your browser. No signup, no login.