Statistics
Hotkey
|
Alt+K
|
Right-click menu
|
Statistics
|
PieceWorx Writing Studio provides detailed statistics for all of the pages in your
notebook. Using the
Alt+K hotkey or right-click menu you can display the
Statistics Dialog.
Current Page Tab
The statistics dialog contains up to three tabs, the first of which is the
Current
Page
tab. In this tab, the first thing you will see is the full path of
the page based on the hierarchical structure of your notebook:
The full path in this case indicates that the current page,
Lorem Ipsum,
is a child of the page named
Test.
The statistics presented for the current page include the following:
- Character Count
- Word Count
- Sentence Count
- Average Characters Per Word
- Average Words Per Sentence
- Coleman-Liau Index
The first three items, character count, word count and sentence count,
are self explanatory. They are used primarily to measure content length targets.
The last three statistics
Average Characters Per Word,
Average Words Per
Sentence
and
Coleman-Liau Index are used primarily for assessing
readability and quality.
The
Coleman-Liau Index
is similar to other
readability metrics
such as the
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level
formula, also known as the FK score.
The Coleman-Liau Index is a number which approximates the U.S. grade level associated
with the written text. Note that for the most accurate scores you need around 300 words
or more in your content. You may see crazy numbers or even negative numbers in some
cases where there is little or unusual content.
The Coleman-Liau Index lends itself to computerized calculation because it does
not require the counting of syllables which is something difficult for a computer
to do accurately. Many of the readability tests including the FK score rely on counting
of syllables.
A readability assessment is important for writers because readability is one of
the most important qualities of good writing. Indeed, studies show that authors
who use fewer big words, not more, are perceived as more intelligent.
In the end, if you wish to write well, write clearly. The Coleman-Liau score in
the statistics dialog is one of your best tools for helping with this. Authors will
vary, but shoot for a readability grade level around 7 to 9 for most types of writing.
Current and Children Tab
Depending on the amount of content it may take a few seconds for PieceWorx Writing
Studio to analyze all pages when you move to the Current and Children tab.
You will notice in the following screen capture that we see multiple sets of the
standard statistical quantities described above. The first analysis is titled
Current
Page and All Child Pages
. This set of statistics contains numbers for the
combined text of the current page and all children of the current page. These numbers
might be useful for when the current page is a chapter introduction and the child
pages are all subsections of the chapter. Then these statistics tell you the numbers
for you whole chapter.
The second set of statistics is for just the children of the current page, excluding
any content in the current page itself. Again, this allows you to see the overall
statistics for say, all chapters, without having to merge the chapters into a separate
page first.
Below these sets of numbers, you will have the stats for each individual page including
your current page and any children.
All Pages Tab
The All Pages tab is similar to the others. It begins with a set of statistics
for the entire notebook. In the screen capture below you can see for this particular
notebook, which contains a couple copies of Moby Dick, that the total word count
is more than 451,000 words. The character count is nearly 3 million.
After the initial set of stats for the entire notebook, stats for each individual
page are listed.