Guides 07

Polishing your writing with sentence length and word frequency

Concrete ways to make your writing easier to read using average sentence length, the longest sentence and your most frequent words.

See your writing habits in numbers

The hardest part of revising is noticing your own writing habits. Average sentence length, the longest sentence and your most frequent words show those habits as numbers. The ‘Sentences’ and ‘Word frequency’ sections at the bottom of this tool do exactly that.

Average sentence length

The longer the sentence, the harder readers work to connect the subject with the verb. Korean writing instruction commonly advises keeping sentences to roughly 40–60 characters, and English style guides often recommend an average of 15–20 words. These are not absolute rules, but if your average is much longer, it is a sign that some sentences could be split.

Look at variation in length as well as the average. If every sentence is about the same length, the writing becomes monotonous. A rhythm of short sentences for key points and longer ones for explanation is easier to read.

Start with the longest sentence

The ‘Longest sentence’ the tool shows is your first candidate for revision. Long sentences are usually one of the following.

Paste the text again after revising, and the longest sentence will change. Repeat this three or four times, and the whole text will feel noticeably lighter.

Find repetition with word frequency

The top of the word frequency list is usually taken by the text's key topic words, and it is natural for them to appear often. What to look for are words that appear often regardless of the topic.

Turning on ‘Exclude stop words’ hides function words such as particles, articles and conjunctions, making repeated content words easier to see. Turn it off to check how often you use connectors like ‘and’ or ‘but’.

What character composition tells you

The character composition ratio reveals the nature of a text. If a Korean text has a high share of Latin letters, see whether you can cut loanwords or abbreviations. A high share of symbols may mean you are overusing parentheses, quotation marks or special characters. A text with a high share of digits may be easier to read if the figures are organized into a table.

Numbers are tools; judgment is yours

Sentence length and frequency are only clues for reviewing your writing, not the answer. Some texts, like legal documents or academic papers, need long sentences, and in some texts repetition adds emphasis. Use the numbers to find spots worth questioning, then read the text aloud and make the final call.

Last updated: 2026-09-23

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