Plot the emotional arc of any text: a chapter, a blog post, a marketing email, a scene. This tool scores each sentence with an AFINN-style lexicon and VADER negation handling, then graphs the arc Vonnegut-style. See your most positive and most negative sentences, the words driving each, and the overall tone of the piece.
The shape of a story
Kurt Vonnegut argued that every story has a shape, a line you can plot. "Boy meets girl" rises. "Cinderella" curves up, then down, then up. "The Metamorphosis" plummets and stays. Researchers at the University of Vermont later validated this empirically across ~1,300 novels and found just six core shapes in fiction.
The arc graph above does the small version of that exercise for any passage you paste. If your chapter is supposed to build dread and ends on an upbeat sentence, the line will betray you.
What the score means
- +1.5 to +5: strongly positive. Romance, joy, victory scenes.
- +0.5 to +1.5: warmly positive. Most happy commercial fiction sits here.
- +0.15 to +0.5: mildly positive. Optimistic but not glowing.
- −0.15 to +0.15: neutral. Functional prose, action scenes, dialogue without emotional words.
- −0.5 to −0.15: mildly negative. Tension, mild conflict.
- −1.5 to −0.5: darkly negative. Loss, fear, anger.
- Below −1.5: bleak. Horror, grief, devastation.
How to use it for editing
- Paste a single chapter. The tool works on any length, but chapter-scale (1,500–5,000 words) gives the most useful arc.
- Look at the arc, not the overall. The overall score averages out movement. The line shows where emotional weight clusters and where it drops away.
- Find the flat stretches. Long horizontal runs near zero often mean either functional connective prose (fine in moderation) or accidentally-flat scenes that should be either cut or charged up.
- Verify the most-positive / most-negative. If the "most negative" sentence in your scary chapter is a sentence you wouldn't flag yourself, the prose may be under-delivering on threat.
What this tool can't do
Sarcasm. "Oh, this is just great" scores positive. Human sarcasm needs context.
Implication. Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" is a heart-breaking story where almost nothing emotional is named. It scores near zero and that's correct on the surface. The emotion lives in the silence. Lexicon analyzers can't catch silence.
Quality judgment. "Strongly positive" isn't praise; "darkly negative" isn't criticism. The score is just a temperature reading.