Measure the draft you actually wrote

By the time a draft is finished it’s too long to hold in your head. You have a feeling you lean on certain words. You suspect the middle drags. Rereading won’t settle it — rereading is how you got here.

So count instead. Reports reads the whole book and gives you twenty-three measurements of it: which words recur, how long your sentences run, how much of the book is spoken aloud, whose point of view carries the story, where you’ve spelled the same thing two ways. It takes about a second, it happens entirely on your machine, and there’s no model involved anywhere in it.

The overview

Open Reports and the analysis runs itself. You land on a contact sheet — one tile per report, each with its headline number and, where a direction is defensible, a rating out of five.

• Every report on one screen, so you can see what’s worth opening
• Click a tile to jump to that report in its group
• Past runs are kept, so you can see where a book stood before the revision pass

Repetition

What recurs often enough for a reader to notice.

• Overused Words ranks what you lean on, with character and place names excluded so your protagonist doesn’t top the list
• Echoes catches the same word twice in close range — the kind a reader hears and you don’t
• Clichés and Alliteration flag stock phrases and runs of same-sounding words

Open any row and you get the occurrences. Click one and Verkilo takes you to that section.

Rhythm

The tempo a reader feels, drawn as a chart rather than described.

• Sentence Length and Sentence Variety show whether you’ve been writing the same sentence for six pages
• Dialogue measures how much of the book is spoken, and how you tag it
• Pacing Curve plots the book against itself, so a sag in the middle looks like one

Clarity

How easily the sentences read.

• Readability scores the whole book and charts where the density shifts, chapter by chapter
• Sticky Sentences counts how much of your prose is glue — the function words holding the content words together
• Vague Diction, Adverbs and Possible Passive count the habits every revision pass goes hunting for
• Sensory Balance breaks description down by sense, which is usually how you discover the book is all eyes
• Transitions tracks the connective words that pile up between scenes

Possible Passive is honest about being a heuristic: it looks for a be-verb and a participle, so it will hand you a few false positives rather than quietly miss the real ones.

Structure

The book’s architecture, read from the binder rather than the prose. These are the questions a series author asks and a word processor can’t answer.

• POV Balance shows whose viewpoint the book actually spends its words in
• Character Presence and Location Coverage show where each name appears — and the long gaps where it doesn’t
• Scene Structure compares scene sizes across the book
• Pronouns counts the person the narration settles into

Because Verkilo already knows your cast, your locations and your POV assignments, these reports read the book you’ve described rather than guessing at names.

Consistency

Places the manuscript does the same thing two ways — the errors a proofreader charges you to find.

• Consistency catches spelling, hyphenation and punctuation that drifted between chapter two and chapter thirty
• Acronyms tracks the forms you’ve used for the same term
• House Style counts your own list of banned words and pet phrases, one per line, kept with the project

House Style is the one report you write yourself. Add the words your editor keeps circling, run the reports, and watch the count go to zero.