Free sentence and paragraph counter. Shows total counts, average sentences per paragraph, longest paragraph, and a paragraph-length histogram.
Built and maintained by Paul Clark, Redmoon Software
Use the sentence and paragraph counter for blog editing, content audit, web copy review, or any context where paragraph length affects readability. Essential for long-form writers checking pacing.
Single-purpose counter that complements the comprehensive stats already shown in the sidebar. Useful when paragraph structure (not just word count) is what you're auditing.
The counter tokenizes paragraphs (default: blocks separated by blank lines) and sentences within each paragraph.
Outputs total counts, average sentences per paragraph, longest paragraph (and its position), and a per-paragraph length histogram.
Toggle single-newline mode if your source treats each line break as a paragraph break.
By default, paragraphs are separated by blank lines (double newlines). Toggle single-newline mode if your text uses single line breaks for paragraphs.
For web/blog reading, 3-5 sentences per paragraph. Academic and book prose often runs longer. Very long paragraphs scare web readers.
End punctuation (. ! ?) followed by whitespace and a capital letter. Abbreviations and decimals can confuse the detector.
Input
A blog post with 8 paragraphs and 32 sentences.
Output
32 sentences across 8 paragraphs — avg 4.0 sentences / ¶. Longest ¶: 7 sentences.
Most blog posts read best at 3-5 sentences per paragraph. The longest paragraph (7 sentences) is a candidate for splitting.
A document can have well-formed sentences and unreadable paragraphs. This tool reports both levels — sentences per paragraph and words per paragraph, with their distributions — because the two fail independently and the fixes are different.
The pattern that causes most trouble is the wall: a paragraph of eight or ten sentences with no break. On screen, where line length is wide and there is no page edge to help the eye track, readers skip those rather than read them.
The rule that actually governs is that a paragraph should hold one idea, which means length follows from the idea rather than from a target. Some ideas need one sentence; a single-sentence paragraph is a legitimate and emphatic form, not an error.
What to look for in the distribution is uniformity. Paragraphs that are all the same length usually mean the writer was breaking on rhythm rather than on meaning, and the result reads evenly but argues poorly — the reader gets no signal about which units are important.
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