Paragraph counter
Paste your text to count paragraphs, sentences and words at once, plus the average words and sentences per paragraph. It is a quick way to check the structure and rhythm of essays, articles, blog posts and reports — long, dense paragraphs are a common readability problem, and the averages show them at a glance.
Who uses this tool
- Writers and editors checking that paragraphs are roughly uniform in length before submitting a draft
- Content marketers who need to confirm blog posts stay within a target paragraph length for readability scores
- Students checking essays against a requirement like “each paragraph should contain at least 4 sentences”
- Teachers reviewing submitted writing for structural patterns
- Developers testing whether auto-generated text has sensible paragraph breaks
How it works
The counter analyses three things in your text:
- Paragraphs — blocks separated by one or more blank lines (
\n\s*\n). - Sentences — segments split on
.,!or?followed by a space or the end of the text. - Words — runs of non-whitespace characters.
It then computes two averages, each rounded to one decimal:
avg words per paragraph = total words ÷ paragraphs
avg sentences per paragraph = total sentences ÷ paragraphsWorked example
Consider three paragraphs. The first has 2 sentences and 24 words. The second has 3 sentences and 35 words. The third has 1 sentence and 11 words:
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Paragraphs | 3 |
| Sentences | 6 |
| Words | 70 |
| Avg words / paragraph | 70 ÷ 3 = 23.3 |
| Avg sentences / paragraph | 6 ÷ 3 = 2.0 |
The third paragraph’s single sentence pulls the average down. If you are targeting 3–4 sentences per paragraph, that flags it as a candidate to expand or merge.
Reading the averages as diagnostic signals
- Average sentences per paragraph below 2 — the text may be choppy, with very short isolated paragraphs or a single run-on block that isn’t separated. Consider merging or splitting accordingly.
- Average words per paragraph above 150 — paragraphs are likely too dense for online reading. Most readability guides suggest 100 words or fewer for web content.
- High variance — if you notice one giant paragraph dragging the average up while the rest are short, that outlier is where to focus revision first.
The tool treats the entire text as one paragraph if there are no blank lines separating blocks, which is useful for catching text that was pasted without proper formatting.
Everything is counted privately in your browser — nothing is uploaded.