Prose Analysis — Quantitative Signals

Scripts that measure mechanical properties of prose. These produce numbers, not quality verdicts. The numbers become useful only when compared against the project's own baseline — research shows no reliable universal thresholds for "good" prose exist.

What the Scripts Measure

The bundled resources/analyze.sh script produces:

• Sentence length distribution — mean, median, min, max, standard deviation. Compare across chapters for consistency. High variance often indicates varied rhythm (usually good); low variance may indicate monotone pacing.
• Sentence opener variety — categorizes first words of sentences (pronoun, article, conjunction, name, other). Heavy pronoun-leading ("I did... I saw... I felt...") is a common POV drift signal.
• Dialogue-to-narration ratio — proportion of lines that are dialogue vs narration. Useful for scene-type comparison (action scenes should skew narration, conversation scenes should skew dialogue).
• Repetition detection — words and short phrases that appear multiple times within a sliding window of N paragraphs. Catches echoed words the author didn't intend.
• Pronoun distribution — counts of I/me/my vs he/she/they/etc. Useful as a POV consistency check (a first-person chapter with sudden third-person pronouns needs investigation).

Running the Script

bash resources/analyze.sh <file.md> [window_size]