Paragraph counter

A paragraph is a block of text separated from the next by a blank line. Compare the paragraph count with the sentence count and you can see immediately whether your blocks are running long.

The blank-line convention is what almost every editor produces when you paste, but it is not universal: text using a single line break between paragraphs will read as one long paragraph here. If your count comes back as one when you expected twenty, that is the reason — add blank lines between the blocks. As for what a good number is, three to five sentences a paragraph suits print and is too long for the web, where two to three reads far better on a phone. A wall of text is the most common structural problem in online writing, and this number is the quickest way to catch it.