A practical writing exercise
Audit a draft with word and phrase counts
Produce a one-page diagnostic note with counting rules, three located candidates, and a justified keep or revise decision for each; make no literary-quality score from the counts.
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Your starting material
Use this complete original material for the demonstration. You can copy or download it before working through the steps.
Original practice draft, including its three paragraphs. Count only the story below, not this instruction or an added title: At the red light, the passenger asked for the longer road. I checked the meter, checked the mirror, and checked the folded map she held against her coat while the cars behind us began to sound their horns and rain blurred the turn that would have taken us straight to the hospital. The red light changed. She did not ask me to hurry. At the hospital gate she unfolded the map, which was a child's drawing of the road past the bakery. I took that road back alone. At the red light, I let the meter rest.
Deliberately flawed example
Deliberately flawed example: The second sentence is the longest, so it is bad. 'Red light' appears three times, so remove every occurrence. The version with the fewest words is the best story.
Freeze the counting convention
For this English exercise, count letter/number runs as words, keeping internal apostrophes and hyphens together. Punctuation and emoji are not words. Count characters as Unicode code points, including whitespace, with LF line breaks. Blank lines separate paragraphs. Sentence punctuation and line breaks supply an approximate sentence boundary; abbreviations can need manual checking.
Copy the story only. It contains 97 words, 504 Unicode code points including whitespace, three paragraphs, and seven sentences under that rule. Sentence word counts are 11, 41, 4, 7, 19, 6, and 9. These describe the sample; they are not target values for other fiction.
Turn a flag into a question
With a thirty-word review threshold, sentence 2 is the only long-sentence flag. Read it for competing actions: the driver's checks, horns behind, and the blurred turn. The question is whether the reader can track the decision to take the longer road, not whether forty-one is forbidden.
For phrase review, use case-insensitive contiguous two-word windows and do not cross punctuation. 'Red light' occurs in sentences 1, 3, and 7. 'Checked' appears three times in sentence 2 when inspected as a single word. Record these locations so you can return to the text rather than rewriting from a frequency list.
Write a decision, including a keep
A diagnostic note should explain what each pattern does. The red light frames a change: initially it delays a paid journey; finally the driver allows a pause with the meter resting. Its recurrence is evidence for reading, not a verdict. The repeated checks can show hesitation, while the crowded horn clause may still be simplified.
After a revision, re-read for lost facts. Reducing a count is only useful if the chosen effect survives. Do not apply one sample's thresholds as rules for all languages or voices.
One possible revision
One possible revision — diagnostic note: Scope/method: story text only, English token rule stated above; no title or Markdown. 97 words; 504 code points including LF whitespace; 3 paragraphs. Sentence lengths: 11/41/4/7/19/6/9. Review threshold: more than 30 words; it is a flag chosen for this pass. Candidate 1, sentence 2: 41 words combine driver attention, traffic and route information. Revise to give the attention shift a boundary. Candidate 2, sentence 2: 'began to sound their horns' delays a direct action. Revise to 'sounded their horns' because the start of the horn noise is not a separate story event here. Candidate 3, sentences 1/3/7: 'red light' appears three times. Keep: the final pause changes the meaning of the opening stop. Also keep the three 'checked' verbs as a deliberate hesitation rhythm, unless a later full-draft reading finds that pattern overused. Proposed replacement for sentence 2 only: 'I checked the meter, checked the mirror, and checked the folded map she held against her coat. Behind us, horns sounded, and rain blurred the turn that would have taken us straight to the hospital.' Fact check: map remains folded here; passenger still chooses the longer road; the hospital remains the destination; the child-drawing reveal stays later. The new boundary improves this chosen emphasis; it is not proof that shorter sentences are universally better.
What changed and why
- Added an explicit counting method and located the long sentence, making the observation reproducible rather than calling it a quality score.
- Split an overloaded attention shift and removed a low-value onset phrase while retaining the route, the map's state, and the later reveal.
A choice worth keeping
Keep all three 'red light' occurrences. The final recurrence lets a routine traffic delay become a chosen pause; replacing it with a synonym would weaken that return.
Try it with fresh material
Original transfer draft: The kettle clicked. I set two cups on the table, although the letter had said she was not coming and the last bus had already passed the lane where she used to wave at our kitchen window. The kettle clicked. This time I poured one cup and put the other back. Rain tapped the lid of the empty tin. I left the chair where it was.
State a word/sentence/paragraph counting convention, count the sample, and create three located review candidates. Decide keep or revise for each, preserving at least one intentional recurrence. Supply any proposed replacement and check its facts. Deliver a one-page diagnostic note rather than a score.
Feedback for your attempt
- Can another reader reproduce your count using your stated rule? If a hyphen or contraction matters, record how you treated it.
- Does a proposed cut remove the evidence that the expected guest is absent? Restore causal information before celebrating the shorter total.
- Explain whether the kettle return or another recurrence changes meaning. Different decisions are valid when supported by the text.
Check before moving on
- Record the selected language and scope with every count.
- A high count asks you to inspect a location; it does not determine what to delete.
- Retain at least one pattern for a stated narrative reason, and allow an unknown when the excerpt is too short to judge a whole-draft habit.
Use a tool with this method
Original story and diagnostic demonstration authored by an AI agent. Counts are deterministic observations of the quoted sample, not a quality assessment or human preference result. An independent AI agent completed the transfer exercise and archived its artifacts; no human reader testing is claimed. Material version: 2026-10-18.