Fiction writers often want to know the balance between spoken dialogue and narration, since too little dialogue can feel dense while too much can feel thin. This calculator finds text wrapped in quotation marks, counts those words as dialogue, and compares them to the total to give you a dialogue percentage. It recognizes straight double quotes and curly quotation marks, which cover most manuscripts and typed drafts. The result helps you check pacing across a scene or chapter, since dialogue heavy passages read faster and narration heavy passages read slower. Many popular novels sit somewhere between 25 and 50 percent dialogue, though genre and style shift that range widely. It also shows the dialogue word count, the narration word count and the number of quoted passages. Everything is computed locally in your browser, so your manuscript stays private and is never uploaded.
It detects text inside quotation marks and calculates what share of your total words is spoken dialogue versus narration.
It varies by genre and scene, but seeing your ratio helps you balance spoken lines against description and narration.
It relies on quotation marks to find dialogue, so consistent quote styling gives the most accurate percentage.
Fiction writers often want to know the balance between spoken dialogue and narration, since too little dialogue can feel dense while too much can feel thin. This calculator finds text wrapped in quotation marks, counts those words as dialogue, and compares them to the total to give you a dialogue percentage.
Yes. Dialogue Percentage Calculator is completely free, with no sign-up and no usage limits.
Yes. Dialogue Percentage Calculator runs in any modern web browser. There is nothing to download or install.
Yes. Dialogue Percentage Calculator runs entirely on your device in your browser, so nothing you enter is uploaded to a server.