Paragraph Counter
Paste or type your text to count its paragraphs and see how its words are spread across them. Paragraph count is a structural measure, not a quality score. Your text never leaves your browser.
Leave a blank line between paragraphs. Results update as you type.
Paragraph structure
No paragraphs yet
What should I do next?
You have counted the paragraphs. Now look at sentences and readability.
Sentence Counter
Counts sentences and shows how many words each has, with the average, shortest and longest.
Readability Checker
Estimates how hard your text is to read with five established formulas, and explains what each one measures.
Paragraph Structure and Counting
How academic paragraphs are built, from topic sentence to transition; what makes a paragraph unified and coherent; why length varies; and how the Paragraph Counter decides where one paragraph ends and the next begins.
How paragraphs are counted
- A paragraph ends at a blank line. Lines with only a single line break between them stay in the same paragraph, so text wrapped by hand counts once. Several blank lines in a row count as one break.
- Choose “At every line break” when each paragraph is on its own line, as in text pasted from a word processor. This is the rule the Word Counter and Text Statistics use, so their paragraph counts match it.
- A paragraph needs at least one letter or number. Blank lines and decorative lines such as *** are not paragraphs.
- Words are counted exactly as the Word Counter counts them, so the paragraphs' words add up to the total.
- The average is rounded to one decimal place. When paragraphs tie for shortest or longest, the first is shown. Each paragraph in the list is identified by its first 8 words.
What the counter can't know
- Where your paragraphs end in the original document. The counter sees only the text you paste, and some editors don't copy paragraph breaks the way they display them.
- Headings, captions, block quotations and list items, which look like short paragraphs when pasted.
- Whether a paragraph works. It measures length, not unity, coherence or argument.
Reading the results
- Paragraph count is a structural measure, not a quality score. A strong academic paragraph usually develops one main idea, but paragraph length varies by discipline, purpose and writing context.
- There is no correct number of words for a paragraph. An unusually long or short one may be worth a second look: a very long paragraph may combine several ideas, and a very short one may need developing or joining to its neighbour.
- Compare paragraphs within your own text, and with the expectations of your discipline or assignment, rather than with a fixed rule.
Privacy
Your text is analysed entirely in your browser. It is never sent to ResearchKit or anyone else, and it isn't stored: closing or reloading the page clears it.