Sentence length is one of the quickest ways to judge readability — long, rambling sentences are a common reason essays lose clarity marks. This sentence counter counts sentences, words and average sentence length, and flags sentences that may be running too long.
It works in the browser with no upload, so you can paste an essay and see the breakdown instantly.
Academic prose sits comfortably between 15 and 20 words per sentence on average. Past 25 the writing becomes tiring; past 30 a reader is usually scanning back to find the main verb, and that effort gets attributed to your thinking rather than your punctuation.
Variation matters more than the average itself. A page of uniform 20-word sentences is monotonous even at an ideal mean. A short sentence after two long ones creates emphasis, and it is the cheapest improvement available to most drafts.
Find the main verb. If you have to hunt for it, so did your reader. Most overlong sentences contain two or three complete ideas joined by "and", "which" or a comma splice, and separating them at those joints fixes the sentence without rewriting a word.
Watch for stacked relative clauses — "the framework which was developed in 2019 which sought to address the problem that had been identified…". Each "which" pushes subject and verb further apart. Breaking the chain in two makes the meaning immediate.
A long sentence can be perfectly clear when its structure is simple — a main clause followed by a list, for instance. A short one can be opaque if it is dense with nominalisations: "Implementation prioritisation necessitates stakeholder consultation" is six words and hard work.
So use the count to find candidates for revision, not verdicts. Read the flagged sentences aloud; the ones where you run out of breath or lose the thread are the ones to split.
Sentences are detected by terminal punctuation, so abbreviations containing full stops — et al., i.e., e.g., Dr. — can inflate the figure slightly. Decimal numbers usually do not, but unusual formatting sometimes does. Treat the number as indicative.
It also cannot tell whether a sentence earns its place. That judgement stays yours, and it is worth making at the paragraph level: a paragraph of six sentences where two say the same thing has a problem no sentence-length metric will surface.
Around 15 to 20 words for academic writing. Beyond 25 it becomes tiring, though variation matters as much as the average.
No. A well-structured long sentence is fine. The problem is a long sentence carrying several unrelated ideas, which most of them do.
Abbreviations with full stops — et al., i.e., Dr. — read as sentence endings. Treat the figure as indicative rather than exact.
Only up to a point. Uniformly short sentences read as choppy and hide the relationships between ideas. Aim for variation.
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