Dialogue Practice Tool
Prompt
Two people who used to be friends meet at a funeral. Neither mentions the reason they stopped speaking.
Write directly here or paste a passage. Nothing is uploaded, and nothing is stored beyond this tab.
Your dialogue
Who speaks
- Mara2 speech(es) · 9 words
- Dev1 speech(es) · 7 words
Longest speech: Dev, 7 words
Attribution verbs
Every attribution uses said, asked, replied or answered. Nothing to flag.
Report
Dialogue — 3 speech(es), 16 words Speakers: Mara (2), Dev (1) Questions: 0 · Exclamations: 0 · Adverb tags: 1 Plain tags: 1 · Other verbs: none Longest speech: Dev, 7 words
How to read this
Verbs other than said, asked, replied and answered are listed as “said-bookisms” — a long list is a prompt to check whether a character is hissing and breathing too often, not a rule that they may not. Adverb tags are counted for the same reason.
Speakers are found from a script prefix (Name: "speech") or from a name immediately before an attribution verb; a name the tool cannot place is counted as unnamed. It measures your text, does not rewrite it and does not judge whether the dialogue is good.
The dialogue practice tool gives you a prompt to write from and measures the exchange you write: who speaks, how long each speech runs, which attribution verbs you used and how many lines are questions.
What is Dialogue Practice Tool?
The dialogue practice tool is built around the loop that improves dialogue fastest: write a short exchange, then look at what you actually did. It offers a prompt — two old friends at a funeral, a negotiation where both people want the same thing, a character with five words left before they leave — and a space to write the exchange, then measures the result. The measurement is deliberately plain, because a writer revising dialogue wants facts, not praise.
The first fact is who speaks. Speeches written as a script line, with the name and a colon, are attributed directly; prose dialogue with quotation marks has its speaker read from the name before an attribution verb. From that the tool counts how many speeches each character has and how many words they carry, which is the fastest way to see that one character has quietly taken over an exchange. The average speech length does the same job at a different scale: a page of one-line exchanges reads as a tennis match, and a page of long speeches reads as two essays taking turns.
The attribution verbs are the second fact. Every verb other than said, asked, replied and answered is listed as a said-bookism — hissing, barking, breathing and the rest — and a long list is a prompt to check how often a character is doing it. The tool counts adverb tags the same way, since "he said quietly" does a job the line itself could do. Neither list is a rule: a character is allowed to whisper. Counting the habits is what lets a writer decide which ones are worth keeping.
The tool also counts how many speeches end in a question and how many in an exclamation. In an exchange, a run of questions with no answers reads as an interrogation, and a page where everyone is exclaiming reads as a shouting match; seeing the shape as a number is often enough to spot the problem. Narration lines between speeches are counted separately, so a passage that is mostly narration with a little dialogue is visible as such.
Repetition across an exchange is the next thing the counts reveal. If two characters keep answering in the same sentence shape, or every speech opens with the other's name, the pattern is invisible while writing and obvious in the list. Reading the speeches back with the word counts beside them also shows where a beat is being explained rather than exchanged: a four-word line followed by a forty-word line usually means one character is talking at the other, which may be exactly right and may be the scene failing. The tool does not decide which — it puts the numbers where the decision is.
Nothing is uploaded and nothing is stored beyond the tab, and the tool never rewrites a line. It measures an exchange you wrote against habits that are easy to miss in the middle of writing, and it says plainly that said-bookisms, adverb tags and question counts are prompts to consider rather than rules to obey.
How to use Dialogue Practice Tool
- Read the prompt, or press next prompt for another situation.
- Write the exchange, one speech per line as Name: "speech", or paste a passage.
- Check who speaks and how the words are distributed between them.
- Read the attribution verbs and adverb tags as prompts, not rules.
- Note the question and exclamation counts, then revise the lines you want to change.
When to use Dialogue Practice Tool vs related tools
Use the dialogue practice tool when an exchange is drafted and you want to see its shape before you revise it. When the problem is the room the exchange happens in rather than the lines, the Scene Description Builder prompts the sensory details, and when a character in the exchange feels flat the Character Profile Builder asks what they want and need.
If the exchange sits inside a scene you are still planning, the Plot Point Mapper shows how the scene carries the beats around it.
Privacy & Security
This tool runs entirely in your browser — no data ever leaves your device. There is no server round-trip, no upload, no logging, and no account required. Your input is processed locally using client-side JavaScript and is never stored, transmitted, or accessible to anyone else. When you close the tab, everything disappears.