Craft & Style
Emotional Restraint
Detects overwrought emotional expression in narration — exclamations, melodramatic clichés, and adjective piling.
What It Does
Flags three patterns that signal melodrama in prose narration:
- Exclamation marks in narration — almost always overwrought outside dialogue
- Melodramatic clichés — "tears streamed", "heart shattered", "blood ran cold"
- Emotion adjective piling — 3+ emotional words in the same sentence
Skips dialogue — characters can be as dramatic as they like.
Why It Matters
"Don't describe emotions the reader should feel" — Anton Chekhov. Overwrought narration tells the reader how to feel instead of showing. It appears in 4.2% of DestructiveReaders critiques, with a high lift co-occurrence with clichés (Lift 2.78) and wordiness (Lift 1.94).
What Gets Flagged
| Severity | Example | Why | Suggested Revision |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hint | "The sky blazed with color**!**" | Exclamation in narration | Remove ! — let the image speak |
| Information | "Tears streamed down her face" | Melodramatic cliché | Show grief through action or physical detail |
| Information | "She felt devastated, agonized, hopeless" | 3+ emotion words stacked | Pick the strongest one |
Configuration
No configuration options.
Technical Details
- Source:
prose-craft - Scope: Sentence-level (skips dialogue)
- Method: Exclamation detection, regex cliché matching, emotion-word clustering