Writing calculators

Tools for writers, editors, and anyone who has ever needed to know whether a bit of prose is too long, too short, or just right. Nothing here gets uploaded or stored. Paste your text in, get the numbers, close the tab.

What writing calculators actually solve

Writing is mostly judgement. No tool is going to tell you whether a sentence is good. What a tool can do, and where the calculators in this category earn their place, is answer the small mechanical questions that get in the way of the judgement: is this paragraph too dense for the audience, will this headline land at half-strength because it is twelve words long, has the word "leverage" snuck in three times in the same section, is the read time on this article going to scare a casual visitor off. None of those questions need a person, and none of them need an upload to a third-party server. They need a quick, accurate count, and the headspace to keep writing.

The other reason these tools exist is privacy. A surprising number of free writing tools quietly send your draft to a server, log it, and in some cases use it as training data. For an unpublished blog post that is annoying. For a resignation letter, a complaint to a regulator, a pitch deck draft, a piece of confidential client work, or anything covered by an NDA, it is a problem. Everything in this category runs in the browser. The text is parsed locally, the counts are calculated locally, nothing is uploaded.

Where the inputs come from

The input is always the same: paste the draft. The interesting question is which version of the draft. For readability scoring, paste the body copy without the headline and the boilerplate. Counting an H1 with eight short words alongside a long paragraph drags the average sentence length down and gives you a misleading score. The Flesch Reading Ease Calculator wants the prose, not the page furniture.

For read-time estimates, the same logic applies but with a wrinkle. The Read Time Calculator gives you both silent and read-aloud figures, because they are useful for different things. Silent is what you put on a blog post header. Read-aloud is what matters for a speech, a podcast script, a wedding reading, or a video voiceover. A typical podcast or audiobook narrator runs at 150 to 160 words per minute. A wedding reading wants closer to 130. The defaults are sensible but configurable, because no two voices are the same.

For headline scoring, paste the actual headline you are considering, not a paraphrase. The Headline Power-Word Score looks at length, power-word density, sentiment skew, presence of numbers, and the stop-word ratio. It is a diagnostic, not a verdict. A perfectly good headline can score in the middle of the range; a clickbait headline can score at the top. Use it to spot the headline you wrote at 4pm on a Friday that is missing something, not to optimise away your judgement.

Common mistakes

The first is treating Flesch scores as a target. Aiming for "Reading Ease 70" on every piece of writing produces flat, primary-school prose. The right score depends on the audience. Tabloid front pages sit around 60 to 70. Broadsheet feature writing is happily in the 50s. Academic and legal writing lives in the 30s and 40s and there is no point pretending otherwise. The score is a sense-check, not a goal.

The second is over-trusting word count limits. A meta description has a pixel limit, not a character limit, but a tweet has a real character ceiling, an SMS has a real ceiling, and an SEO title gets pixel-truncated by Google. The Word Count Tool shows the four most common limits side by side because they each work differently and confusing them is how content ends up cut off.

The third is editing for the score instead of the reader. A tool can tell you a sentence is 38 words long and probably worth breaking up. It cannot tell you whether the rhythm of a particular long sentence is doing useful work in a particular paragraph. Sometimes a long sentence is exactly right. Use the numbers as a prompt to look at the writing again, not as an instruction to chop.

If you only bookmark one tool from this category, make it the Word Count Tool. It does the boring counting jobs that come up in every writing day, and it never asks for your email. More tools are queued up: a passive-voice highlighter, a sentence-length distribution viewer, and a transition-word frequency checker.

  • Flesch Reading Ease Score Calculator

    Paste text and see its Flesch Reading Ease score and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level live as you type, with the word, sentence and syllable counts that produced them.

  • Read Time Calculator

    Paste any text and get an estimated read time, silent and aloud, based on standard words-per-minute ranges. Configurable if you disagree with the defaults.

  • Word Count Tool

    Live word, character, sentence and paragraph counts, plus fit-checks for tweet, meta description, SMS and SEO title limits.

  • Suffolk Lorem Ipsum

    Placeholder text in Suffolk dialect, drawn from Charlie Haylock's work and the East Anglian dialect tradition. Because "lorem ipsum dolor sit amet" is done to death.

  • English to Suffolk Translator

    Paste English, see it transformed into Suffolk dialect word by word. Companion to the Suffolk Lorem Ipsum generator, sharing the same vocabulary.

  • Headline Power-Word Score

    Score a headline 0 to 100 based on power words, length, sentiment skew, numbers and stop-word ratio. Get suggestions to make it punchier.

Frequently asked questions

What word count target should I aim for in a blog post?

Pillar pages and definitive guides typically rank well at 1,500 to 3,000 words; news and opinion at 600 to 1,000; how-to and product pages at whatever length actually answers the question, often 800 to 1,500. Length that pads is worse than length that answers, so write to the question, not to a target. The Word Count Tool shows live counts as you draft.

What is a good Flesch reading ease score?

For general web writing, aim for 60 or higher. Newspapers land between 60 and 70, plain-English government writing usually around 65. Below 30 reads like academic or legal prose. The Flesch Reading Ease Calculator shows the score plus the Flesch-Kincaid grade level so you can see where you sit.

How many characters fit in a tweet, SMS or meta description?

Tweet/X post 280, SMS 160 (longer splits into two messages and costs twice), meta description truncated around 160 in Google, SEO page title around 60 characters or roughly 580 pixels. The Word Count Tool checks all of these live as you type.

Are these tools sending my writing anywhere?

No. Every writing tool here runs in your browser. Drafts you paste in are never uploaded, logged or stored. You can disconnect from the network and they still work. Useful for unpublished client work, draft resignation letters, or anything you would not paste into a server-side tool.

What makes a high-scoring headline actually work?

Power words, a clear emotion (positive or negative, not neutral), a specific number where it fits, six to twelve words long, a benefit or a curiosity hook. The Headline Power-Word Score grades a draft against these and other patterns and gives plain-English suggestions for fixing the weak parts.

Why a privacy-first writing tool matters

Most free writing tools work by shipping your draft to someone's server. Which is fine when the draft is a blog post and you don't care. Less fine when the draft is a resignation letter, a legal statement, or a bit of client work that hasn't been published yet. These run entirely in your browser. Your text never leaves your device.

Expect this category to fill out as common writer-and-editor tasks come up: character counters, reading grade level, title and description length checkers, text case conversion. All the same promise: no upload, no storage, no nonsense.