Manuscript analysis

The headline screen. A composite score out of 100, the count of issues by severity (critical, warning, suggestion), the top five things to look at, and a tile for each report section so you can dive in wherever you like.

The composite is generous. It starts at 100 and ticks down for each thing the engine flags, weighted by severity. A book in good shape lands in the eighties or higher.

Flesch reading ease, Flesch-Kincaid grade level, Gunning Fog, Coleman-Liau. Four established formulas that quantify how heavy your prose is to read.

The numbers are there because they correlate with how broadly accessible the prose feels. The report flags chapters that drift far from the rest of the book (a sign that voice or audience pitched without you noticing) and individual scenes whose readability sits well outside what your genre tends to expect.

Adverb density, passive voice, sentence variety, and show-vs-tell density. Plus dialogue ratio with a genre-aware target band: romance manuscripts tend to land 35-55 percent dialogue; thrillers 20-40 percent; epic fantasy 15-30 percent. The report flags scenes that fall well outside the band you would expect for your genre.

Cliches and crutch words. The engine carries a list of common cliched phrases (like 'her heart raced' or 'at the end of the day') and flags scenes where they land. Crutch words are content words you have used a lot more than makes sense for a manuscript of your length, which usually means you are leaning on them without noticing.

An energy curve across every scene in your book, plus POV and tense drift. The energy score is a blend of sentence rate, dialogue presence, and action verbs (high in fight scenes, low in expository chapters). The report flags any run of three or more low-energy scenes back to back, which is usually where readers stall.

POV and tense drift compares your prose to the targets you set in your project's Voice (first person versus third, past versus present). When the prose drifts, the report names the scenes where it happens.

One row per character from your Story Index. Scenes they appear in, lines of dialogue, agency score (a rough measure of how often they take action versus react), percent of total page time, and a sentiment arc tracking the emotional weight of their scenes across the manuscript.

The point isn't to optimize the numbers; it's to notice when something looks off. A protagonist whose page time is 18 percent might want a closer look. A secondary character whose sentiment arc never changes is one you might want to give an actual journey.

The Chekhov check. The engine looks for objects, places, and named items that show up exactly once in the manuscript, usually a setup that never paid off, or a payoff that has no setup. Both are worth looking at on revision.

Beat coverage sits here too: how many beats from your active outline have a scene anchored to them, and which ones are still uncovered.

How consistent your voice is across chapters. Average sentence length, sentence-length variance, and tonal markers compared chapter by chapter. The report flags chapters that drift from the rest of the book.

This is the section that usually says the most about a long manuscript. Consistency in voice is one of the things readers feel without being able to name. When this section is quiet, your book reads as one author's voice; when it's loud, it doesn't.

Word count compared to typical genre bands (a 110,000-word romance is uncommon; a 60,000-word epic fantasy is short). The opening hook check looks at the first 500 words for the kinds of signals that tend to land well in the genre you set.

These are not rules. They are conventions. The point is to know when you are leaning into them and when you are leaning out, on purpose.

How well your prose lines up with the story you said you were telling. The report reads from your Promise layer (the things this book is owed to deliver) and your Closure ledger (the open setups you have not yet paid off) and surfaces the gaps.

If you set up a curse on page 42 and never lift it, this section says so. If your Promise says 'this is a story about choosing love over duty' and the prose has not put a duty option on the page yet, this section says that too.