Most writers do not know how lopsided their dialogue is until they count it. One character does 70% of the talking. The word “said” appears 40 times in ten pages, or it never appears at all. This tool measures those things in seconds, from a paste.
Speaking share: who controls the conversation
In a two-person scene, a 60/40 speaking split is normal. A 90/10 split is a character problem: the quieter person is not a participant, they are an audience. The percentage is not a rule, but it is a fast check. If the number surprises you, something in the scene is worth rereading.
The “Unattributed” bucket shows lines where no speaker tag or adjacent name was found. In clean dialogue, this is often intentional: rapid back-and-forth without tags, action beats where the speaker is obvious from context. A large Unattributed count just means the tool could not confirm attribution, not that the writing is wrong.
Dialogue ratio: how much of your prose is speech
Genre fiction (thrillers, romance, commercial fantasy) tends to run 40-60% dialogue. Literary fiction often sits at 20-40%. Neither range is a target. Ratio is a descriptive number, not a prescriptive one. The interesting question is not whether you hit a range but whether the ratio matches the kind of book you are writing.
A 70% dialogue ratio in a thriller chapter is often fine. The same ratio in a quiet, interior novel suggests the interiority has gone missing.
The case for “said”
The most-used verb in most published fiction is “said.” This is not laziness. “Said” is functionally invisible. Readers parse it as punctuation and keep moving. “Exclaimed,” “hissed,” and “growled” are visible: the reader notices them, which means the reader is noticing the machinery.
Expressive tags are not bad. A well-placed “whispered” or “snapped” does work. But they work because they are rare. If you have more expressive tags than neutral ones, the exception has become the rule.
Adverb tags (“said quietly,” “asked nervously”) are the most reliably cuttable category. Usually the dialogue itself, or the action beat, already does the job the adverb is trying to do.
Action beats as attribution
An action beat is a line of narration in a dialogue paragraph with no speech verb:
She set down the glass. “I already know what you are going to say.”
The reader infers she is speaking. This tool classifies that as an action beat (the paragraph has narration but no speech verb). Action beats are often the strongest attribution method because they show character behavior at the same time.
When this tool cannot find a speech verb or a known character name adjacent to the quote, the line goes to “Unattributed.” If you see a high unattributed count, you may have action beats with no prior name context, or rapid tag-free exchanges the tool cannot resolve.
Limitations to know
Attribution accuracy is around 70-80% on clean, well-formatted prose with standard dialogue tags. The tool does not resolve pronouns (it does not know that “he said” refers to Tom), does not handle nested dialogue, and works best with double-quoted dialogue. It is a fast orientation pass, not a manuscript audit.