About the Paragraph Counter
A paragraph count only means something once you agree where a paragraph ends. Three definitions are offered because documents disagree. Blank line mode is the standard for anything written in Markdown, plain text or a chat box, and it is the default. Every line break mode suits text pasted out of a word processor, where each visual paragraph is a single wrapped line with no blank line after it. Indent mode follows the old typographic convention where a new paragraph begins with a tab or a couple of spaces.
Beyond the headline number you get the words, sentences and characters in the whole piece, the average words per paragraph, and which paragraph is the longest and which the shortest. Those two numbers together are the useful part: an average of forty with a longest of one hundred and twenty tells you one block is doing far too much work and should be split before an editor asks you to.
The optional breakdown lists every paragraph with its word count, its sentence count and the first few words so you can find it in the source. Sentence detection inside the breakdown knows about common abbreviations, so a paragraph mentioning Dr. Chen is not counted as two. For sentence level detail across the whole document, Sentence Counter goes deeper, and Word Counter covers reading time and keyword density.
How to use
- Paste your draft into the left pane.
- Choose how a paragraph ends in your document, usually A blank line.
- Read the totals, then scan the breakdown for paragraphs that run long.
- Download the report if you are sending notes back to a writer.
Common questions
- Do blank lines count as paragraphs?
- No. Empty blocks are dropped, so several blank lines in a row still separate just two paragraphs.
- My text is one line per paragraph. Which mode?
- Choose Every line break. Blank line mode would report the whole passage as a single paragraph.
- How are sentences counted inside a paragraph?
- By terminal punctuation, with abbreviations such as Mr. and e.g. protected so they do not split a sentence early.
- Does a heading count as a paragraph?
- Yes, if a blank line follows it. Headings are ordinary blocks of text as far as the counter is concerned.