Text Count - An App for Those Who Write

As a person who writes a lot for my job and for fun, I have a need to make sure I'm not being to verbose and to make sure that what I'm composing is appropriate for the audience it's aimed at. I found a simple tool by indy developer Arthur Smith, Text Count, that makes it easy to get character, word and sentence counts and to get a readability score on the Flesch-Kincaid scale. It analyzes sentence length and word length, plus syllable count to assign a score from 1-100 to the text. The higher the score is, the better. Most business communication should fall in the range from 60-70. A low score indicates that you need to simplify what you've written.

Another useful element of Text Count is an estimated reading and speaking time. The app does not require you to paste the text anywhere. It analyzes what you copy to the clipboard. For people like me, who do their writing in a text editor instead of something like Microsoft Word, it's a handy tool.

Some high-end writing apps like iA Writer have some of these tools built in. Obsidian offers a word and character count out of the box, and you can download a plugin for a readability score.

Text Count is $2.99 at Gumroad.