Both quote styles are read
Straight double quotes and typographic curly quotes are both recognised, so the tool works equally well on a raw draft and on text copied out of a typeset file.
Pacing is felt long before it is measured, and a dialogue ratio calculator turns one of your biggest levers into a hard number instead of a hunch. Paste a scene to see what share of the words are spoken, alongside line lengths and the usual benchmarks for your genre.
Paste a scene, choose a category, and the split recalculates on every keystroke.
Dialogue moves faster on the page than anything else. White space runs down the right margin, the eye drops quickly from line to line, and time inside the story starts running at roughly the speed it runs in life. Description does the opposite. It slows the clock, widens the frame and asks the reader to hold still. The proportion between them is, in practice, your pacing dial.
Neither extreme survives for long. A chapter that is almost entirely speech turns into disembodied voices with nothing anchoring them to a place, and readers lose track of who is talking within half a page. A chapter with no speech at all reads as summary, however beautifully written, because nothing is happening in front of us.
This calculator finds every passage wrapped in double quotation marks, counts the words inside them, counts everything outside, and reports the split. It also records how many separate quoted passages there are and how long the average one runs, which often reveals more than the headline percentage does.
Straight double quotes and typographic curly quotes are both recognised, so the tool works equally well on a raw draft and on text copied out of a typeset file.
Apostrophes in contractions and possessives would wreck the count if single marks were treated as speech, so they are skipped. British-style single-quote dialogue should be converted before pasting.
An average of four words per quoted passage suggests clipped exchanges; an average above forty suggests speeches. Both are legitimate, but neither should run for a whole chapter unnoticed.
The count is of separate quoted passages rather than paragraphs, so an interruption splitting one character's speech registers as two, which is exactly what a reader experiences.
Send the manuscript across and we will handle trim size, typography and retailer-ready export files.
Broad working ranges. Individual books sit outside them all the time, but a manuscript far from its category norm is worth a second look.
| Genre | Usual dialogue share | Reads like | Risk if far outside |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thriller / suspense | 25 - 45% | Short exchanges between fast action beats | Too low and the plot becomes reported summary |
| Romance | 35 - 55% | Relationship built in conversation | Too low and the attraction feels told, not shown |
| Literary fiction | 15 - 35% | Interiority and observation carrying the weight | Too high and the prose loses its texture |
| Cozy mystery | 35 - 55% | Amateur sleuth interviewing the village | Too low and the investigation stalls |
| Middle grade | 30 - 50% | Voice-driven, quick, plenty of white space | Too low and younger readers disengage |
| Young adult | 35 - 55% | Character relationships in real time | Too high and setting disappears entirely |
| Nonfiction | 0 - 10% | Occasional quoted interview or anecdote | Not applicable; most nonfiction sits near zero |
Most commercial fiction settles somewhere between thirty and fifty per cent across a full book, but the useful comparison is against your own category rather than fiction in general. A quiet literary novel at twenty per cent and a fast cozy mystery at fifty are both entirely normal for what they are.
No. Anything outside the quotation marks, including he said and she replied, is counted as narrative. That is the honest way to do it, since a tag is prose on the page even though it belongs to the exchange.
Almost always because the speech is wrapped in single quotation marks, which is standard in much British publishing. The tool deliberately ignores single marks so apostrophes cannot corrupt the result. Convert to double marks in a copy of the text before pasting.
It should not, and a manuscript where it is may be flatter than it needs to be. Confrontations and negotiations naturally run high on speech; travel, aftermath and revelation chapters naturally run low. Variation between chapters is a sign of deliberate pacing.
It reveals the texture of your conversations. Very short averages point to rapid back-and-forth that may need grounding detail; long averages point towards monologue, which can work but rarely for pages at a stretch. Read beside the percentage, it gives a fuller picture than either number alone.
Only if you have wrapped them in double quotation marks, which most house styles advise against. Italicised or unmarked interior thought falls on the narrative side of the split, and that reflects how it reads on the page.
Usually, but not automatically. Long speeches where a character explains backstory slow a scene as effectively as any paragraph of description. Speed comes from short exchanges with consequences, not from quotation marks by themselves.
Yes, and the whole-book number is a useful sanity check against your genre. For revision, though, scene-level analysis is far more actionable, because it points at the specific chapter that has drifted rather than at an average that hides everything.
Dialogue-heavy fiction needs careful spacing, consistent scene-break markers and chapter openers that stay in rhythm across hundreds of pages. That is exactly what our fiction layouts deliver, in print and in ebook.
See Fiction Formatting