Average sentence length is the single fastest readability lever in editing: news copy averages 15–20 words a sentence, and prose that feels “heavy” almost always averages far more. But an average alone doesn’t tell you what to fix.
Our sentence counter does:
- Live counts — sentences, words, and average words per sentence on every keystroke.
- The longest sentence, quoted — not just its length. The tool shows you the actual sentence dragging your average up, because that’s the first thing worth splitting.
- Honest limits — detection is punctuation-based, so “Dr.” can over-count occasionally. We say so on the page instead of pretending otherwise.
- Private by design — analysis runs in your browser; your draft never touches our servers or the URL.
Paste a paragraph, split the monster sentence, paste again, and watch the average drop. It’s the closest thing editing has to a one-move win.
If you run a writing course or a student resource page, the counter is embeddable with a single iframe.