Visualization & Metrics
Style Scorecard
Calculate composite style metrics — concreteness, imagery, vocabulary richness, pacing score.
What It Does
Computes a set of aggregate style metrics for the entire document and flags any that fall outside healthy ranges:
| Metric | What it measures | Healthy range |
|---|---|---|
| Concreteness | Ratio of concrete nouns to abstract nouns | 0.3–0.7 |
| Imagery Density | Percentage of lines with sensory/visual language | 0.2–0.6 |
| Vocabulary Richness | Type-token ratio (unique words / total words) | 0.4–0.8 |
| Sentence Variety | Coefficient of variation of sentence lengths | 0.3–0.8 |
| Dialogue Balance | Percentage of text that is dialogue | 0.15–0.55 |
| Pacing Score | Composite measure of narrative momentum | 0.3–0.7 |
Why It Matters
Style metrics provide an objective "health check" for your prose. No single number tells the whole story, but together they create a profile. A manuscript with 0.1 vocabulary richness is using the same words over and over. One with 0.05 imagery density is almost entirely abstract. These numbers don't tell you what to fix, but they tell you where to look.
What Gets Flagged
Out-of-Range Metrics
Severity: Information
Example (flagged):
Style metric: vocabulary richness is low (0.28) — consider varying word choice. Threshold: 0.40
Why: The type-token ratio is below the healthy range, suggesting repetitive vocabulary.
Example (flagged):
Style metric: dialogue balance is low (0.08) — the text may feel monologue-heavy. Threshold: 0.15
Why: Less than 15% of the text is dialogue, which may make the narrative feel like a long internal monologue.
Metric Descriptions
- Concreteness — "dog" is concrete, "justice" is abstract. Fiction generally benefits from concrete language.
- Imagery Density — How often does the prose engage the senses? Measured via sensory word lists.
- Vocabulary Richness — A type-token ratio near 1.0 means every word is unique (impossible in practice). Below 0.4 suggests heavy repetition.
- Sentence Variety — The coefficient of variation of sentence lengths. Low CV = all sentences are the same length.
- Dialogue Balance — How much of the text is dialogue vs. narration. Too little feels static. Too much feels like a screenplay.
- Pacing Score — A composite of action verb density, sentence length variation, and dialogue presence.
Configuration
No configuration options.
Technical Details
- Source:
prose-craft - Scope: Document-level
- Method: Statistical analysis (type-token ratio, coefficient of variation, density calculations); threshold-based flagging