How we measureLines from published fiction.

Green, orange and red

Each check with a number gets a traffic light, and the lines between the colours come from published fiction, not from guesses:

• Green: what most published novels do.
• Orange: still within what published novels do.
• Red: beyond nearly all of them.

Under 300 words of narration (a short scene) there’s no orange or red, just a count: one adverb in a page of dialogue would be 100 per 1,000 words. Final draft mode lowers every line by a quarter, for when you’re polishing.

Why measure at all? My first guess for repeated words turned every published book I tried red. Jane Austen included.

Where the numbers come from

• Today’s fiction: for the checks that count words, the rate in Google Books’ English Fiction, 2000–2019: 85.3 billion words.
• The spread across published books: my own count across 38 published texts: 32 public-domain novels from 1900–1922 (Christie, Fitzgerald, Wharton, Woolf, Forster, Wodehouse, Lawrence, Joyce, London, Cather and more) and the six fiction sections of the Brown corpus (published American fiction, 1961). Recent novels aren’t free to download.
• Where they differ, the lines follow today’s fiction. Older prose has more adverbs, more “cried” and “exclaimed” (said-bookisms were the fashion then), and more exclamation marks than today’s. That’s why adverbs and dialogue tags go green below the middle of the 38 books.

Some tools publish their own targets. Where those sit below every published novel measured (one adverb per 300 words, say), they weren’t followed.

The lines, check by check

Green up to the first number, orange up to the second, red above it. “38 books” is the middle book, the one 3 in 4 are at or below, and the most, in the narration (dialogue left out).

Readability works the other way round: green at a Flesch score of 70 or more, orange from 60, red below 60. Flesch’s own 1948 paper puts popular fiction at 70–90; the middle of the 38 books scored 76.4. Dialogue and narrative is green with 10–70% dialogue and orange with 3–85%; in the middle book a quarter of the text is dialogue.

The checks that find slips (tense and point of view, name spellings, spelling, Chicago style, monologues) count each one: green with none, orange with a few, red with more. A slip is a slip, however long the book.

Guidelines, not rules

Where there’s a number, it’s what published fiction does, not a law: some published books sit outside it too. You decide what stays. More about that.

Your writing is never sent anywhere, and no AI is used on your writing in any way.

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