What percentage of your story is dialog?

Instructions

Paste the text of your story (or novel) into the text box below, and click the Calculate button. (Your story isn't sent to our server, or anywhere else. The analysis is all done by a script running in your own browser.)

This tool counts anything contained in ‘single’ or “double” quotes, ‘curved’ or 'straight', as dialog. If an opening or closing quotation mark is missing, this will lead to inaccurate results, but not too inaccurate, as the end of a paragraph is also taken as the end of any dialog started, but not yet ended, within that paragraph.

(You'll need Javascript enabled in your browser for this tool to work.)

If you use this tool with text pasted straight from a Gutenberg.org "Plain text" file, you will get the wrong results due to the forced page width line-breaks Gutenberg introduces. Run the text through our Gutenberg Text Reformatting Tool tool to remove these line breaks first.

Your story text

Results

What does this mean?

Some how-to-write manuals say that some readers prefer dialog-driven stories. (I even read in one manual that some readers only read the dialog!) But there are no hard-and-fast rules in writing. Every story is its own special case, and the particular percentage of dialog in your story is really just there to answer your own curiosity.

To round off, here are some results from a handful of literary classics (texts courtesy of Gutenberg.org):