Word count within sentences
December 11, 2018 6:20 AM Subscribe
I am doing some branded content work where for SEO reasons sentences need to be 20 words and under. I would like a website, app, etc where I can post my copy into a window or something, click a button, and it highlights either entire sentences that are too long, or highlights from the point they exceed the sentence word count.
How are you at spreadsheet wrangling? To do this at my company, we use a Google spreadsheet formula that counts the number of spaces in a particular cell. You can also count characters, which is useful for writing meta descriptions and so on.
posted by third word on a random page at 8:21 AM on December 11, 2018
posted by third word on a random page at 8:21 AM on December 11, 2018
I use Hemingway App for similar purposes. You just paste your text into it and it hightlights several writing problems, including hard to read sentences. It doesn't have a hard sentence word limit, but it'll definitely draw your attention to stuff that needs work.
posted by entropone at 8:28 AM on December 11, 2018
posted by entropone at 8:28 AM on December 11, 2018
If this is a very hard requirement you probably want a python script, but if it's just to do a quick look-over you can do a decent job with a regular expression. I whipped up a little one that can probably handle most typically-formatted text. Here it is.
Similar to the spreadsheet solution, all it does highlight any series of characters that have lots of spaces in them (tabs count too) and a period or question mark at the end. It's pretty simple so it might get a little confused by stuff like hyphens.
Some text editors may have the ability to do a "find" based on a regular expression.
posted by one of these days at 10:53 AM on December 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
Similar to the spreadsheet solution, all it does highlight any series of characters that have lots of spaces in them (tabs count too) and a period or question mark at the end. It's pretty simple so it might get a little confused by stuff like hyphens.
Some text editors may have the ability to do a "find" based on a regular expression.
posted by one of these days at 10:53 AM on December 11, 2018 [1 favorite]
This thread is closed to new comments.
If you're treating a "sentence" as just any sequence of words ending in a final punctuation mark, this would also be pretty trivial in a modern scripting language: python example.
posted by aspersioncast at 7:09 AM on December 11, 2018