rose Analyzer

This tool distils years of reading about how sentences work. These are the books and essays behind its metrics.

1. Verb Your Enthusiasm by Sarah KaufmanThe case for strong, precise verbs. Shaped Word choice and the weak-verb boxes.
2. Line by Line: How to Edit Your Own Writing by Claire Kehrwald CookSentence-level editing: cutting wordiness, prepositional chains and nominalizations, and keeping parallel structures parallel. Shaped Word choice and Tactical.
3. Analyzing Prose by Richard A. LanhamReading style as a set of choices: noun style versus verb style, running versus periodic sentences, coordination versus subordination, and the rhythm of sentence length. Shaped Sentence rhythm, Word choice and the clause-linkage counts in Tactical.
4. Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style by Virginia TufteA catalogue of sentence structures, each shown through examples from published prose: openings, appositives, parallelism, cumulative sentences. Shaped Tactical: openers, typology, parallel syntax. Published by Graphics Press, the imprint of her son Edward Tufte, whose design ideas shape this page.
5. Zombie Nouns by Helen SwordAn essay in The New York Times, 2012, on nouns built from verbs and adjectives that drain the life from a sentence. The source of the term, and of the zombie-noun shading in Word choice.

Sources for the formulas

1. Rudolf Flesch, “A New Readability Yardstick”, Journal of Applied Psychology, 1948. Flesch Reading Ease, in Summary.
2. Jean Ure, “Lexical density and register differentiation”, 1971. Lexical density, in Summary.
3. Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. The page’s look: sidenotes, small multiples, the sentence portrait.