Analysis in Akapitly: reading your own text by the numbers

Writing is a series of choices you often can't see in the thick of your own text — because you know what you meant, so you read the intention instead of what's actually on the page. Akapitly shows it as a measurement: where the sentences shorten, where a paragraph balloons, which word keeps coming back. These aren't verdicts. They're a mirror.

Before the tools, one rule that applies to all of them: these are mechanical measurements, not rulings. A short paragraph can be a deliberate punch, to be is sometimes exactly the verb you need, and a triad can be the best sentence on the page. The tool flags things — you make the call.

Highlight modes above the text

Above the preview you have several modes that color the text. You switch one on at a time, and Turn off highlighting clears the colors. In the sentence-length, AI Detox and noise modes you can keep writing with highlighting on — it refreshes itself and the cursor stays put.

Paragraph length

This mode looks at narrative paragraphs and colors three situations: amber for a short paragraph (up to 12 words), red for a run of at least three short paragraphs in a row, and blue for a long paragraph (from ~110 words). Red is a "check whether this is one action chopped into pieces" signal; blue is "you could consider splitting this." It's about the text's breathing: nothing but short paragraphs leaves you winded, and a wall of text wears the reader down.

Sentences per paragraph

Here Akapitly marks one- and two-sentence paragraphs (in two shades of purple). A long run of one-sentence paragraphs can turn prose into a slideshow — but sometimes that's exactly the point. The mode shows the pattern; you judge whether it's intended.

Sentence length

The most interesting mode for working on rhythm. It colors individual sentences: amber for short ones (up to 7 words), blue for long ones (from 30 words). Off to the side it also draws a chart of successive sentence lengths — you can see it like the text's pulse. A flat line of similar sentences reads as monotonous (and, incidentally, very "machine-like"); a healthy rhythm is a wave of shorter and longer. You edit this mode live, so you can rework sentences and watch the chart shift at once.

AI Detox and the Noise meter

Two more modes watch the language itself. AI Detox highlights four patterns of "machine" style (clichés and buzzwords, negation contrast, moralizing paragraph endings, triads), and the Noise meter highlights filler words and the weak verb to be, showing at the top the percentage of words counted as noise. Both run locally, on patterns, without sending your text to any AI, and both show candidates, not errors.

I've broken them down in detail, with examples, in a separate piece: machine style — when prose starts to sound like AI.

Repetition and word frequency

This is a separate panel with an Analyse repetition button. It shows three things an author usually can't see but a reader hears straight away:

• Most frequent words — so you catch a word you overuse without realizing it. (Akapitly groups inflected forms approximately; in English that grouping matters less than in heavily inflected languages, so read it as a clue.)
• Echoes — the same word repeated close together, the kind of repetition that grates on the ear.
• Openings — the words many sentences start with ("And…", "Then…", "He…"). A classic sign of monotonous syntax.

Clicking a word or an echo highlights all its occurrences in the text; clicking an opening highlights only the first word of the matching sentences. Treat it as a lead, not an oracle.

Statistics

The statistics panel counts two things at once. For the active chapter: words, plus characters with and without spaces. For the whole project: the number of chapters, total words, characters, standard pages and an estimated reading time (at ~200 words per minute).

For English-language submissions, the number that matters is the word count — it's what agents and publishers ask for, and what genre expectations are pegged to. Standard pages (counted at 1,800 characters with spaces) is a continental-European measure the panel also reports; it's useful if a market or contract works in pages rather than words. More on counting is in the piece on preparing a manuscript.

How to use this

The goal isn't to extinguish every color — a page without a single highlight can simply be flat. A better method: read the chapter, switch on one mode at a time, and look for surprises. A red run you didn't plan. A word that comes back three times in a paragraph. A sentence chart as flat as a table. Fix what genuinely grates on the ear, and leave the rest — because some of the "irregularities" are your style.

All of this analysis runs on your computer. Your text is never sent anywhere — not to a server, not to any artificial intelligence.

If you're just starting, look first at the step-by-step guide. And once the text is ready — format the manuscript or make an e-book.