Analytical Tools - How well do I write?

Analytical Tools - How well do I write?

These websites give writers quantitatively measurable feedback on their writing style. The results require careful interpretation. They cannot measure creativity.

The Writer's Diet - Helen Sword

Writer's Diet reports on the fitness or flabbiness of your writing by measuring the frequency and variety of certain parts of speech. Results are easy to see but harder to interpret – see the limitations and principles. The tool can identify wordy writing and empty structures but cannot measure creativity.

VocabProfiler - Tom Cobb

VocabProfiler measures the simplicity or difficulty of vocabulary in writing. Results require careful interpretation and reference to the kind of text you are writing. Generally speaking, texts with higher percentages of words from the top-2000-word list are easier to understand. But we expect less frequent and academic words in some text types.

Sentence-Length Variety

We know good writers use much sentence-length variety. But I know of no tool for measuring this. Try this suggested exercise with a paragraph or two of your writing (longer texts will produce more reliable results):

Run your text through a spell-checker or online tool to get the average sentence length and the total number of sentences. The average needs careful interpretation:

15 words per sentence or fewer: easy to understand and ideal for texts you need to make easy to read, e.g. texts for the internet, like this one
around 20 words per sentence or much higher: harder to understand, but common or even expected in genres like academic writing

Check the variety of your sentence lengths. Divide your average sentence length by 4 and by 2. This will give you the 25% and 50% deviations around your average sentence length.
Count the number of sentences that deviate by 25% or 50% or more from the average sentence length. Divide these two numbers by the total number of sentences. Now you can see the percentage of your sentences that deviate a little or a lot from the average sentence length.
Interpret the results carefully. Good writing tends to have higher percentages of sentences that deviate from the average because readers like sentence-length variety. Short, or very short, sentence are really good for emphasis.

Sample Analysis

I wrote this abstract for a workshop on style. The sentence-variety results are positive.

¹English-language teaching disregards an essential skill. ²We train students to communicate clearly and correctly, but why not to communicate creatively? ³The answer comes that 'style' is what rhetoricians and stylisticians do. ⁴But few people study these subjects. Learning how to communicate stylishly – creatively and engagingly – thus seldom occurs in language classrooms, and this oversight tells in students' texts. ⁵Perilously we ignore the teaching of style, caution Helen Sword, Ron Carter and Steven Pinker, for we at best create competent but template-like writers; at worst, writers who serve up dishes lacking fragrance and flavour and toothsomeness. ⁶My workshop addresses this problem. ⁷I will show that to communicate stylishly is to use the figures of speech. ⁸We will examine style in texts, and I will introduce a new website supporting the teaching of the figures.

Results

Average words per sentence:     15
Total number of sentences:        8
25% deviation (+/- 4 words):      2 sentences
50% deviation (+/- 7 words):      4 sentences

10% of the sentences are at least 25% longer or shorter than the average.
33% of the sentences are at least 50% longer or shorter than the average.