How to get the most from Prosemetry

Overview

What Prosemetry does

Most writing tools focus on correction. Prosemetry focuses on understanding. Instead of one quality score, it measures patterns in structure, language, information delivery, guidance, rhythm and style, then shows you exactly which paragraphs produce them.

Every part of the report helps answer three questions:

• Experience. What kind of reading experience does this document create?
• Location. Where do the important patterns occur?
• Action. What, if anything, deserves a closer look or a revision?

The workflow at a glance

After you analyze a document, the dark bar at the top of every page walks you through five steps. Work through them in order: jumping straight to revision can hide the larger patterns that make individual passages meaningful.

Analyze a document

Start on the home page. Upload a Word document (.docx). Prosemetry uses Word’s styles to tell headings, notes and bibliographies apart from your body text, so other formats aren’t accepted yet. Analysis usually takes well under a minute; the progress page shows each stage and opens your Overview when it finishes.

• Prosemetry reads body paragraphs. Titles, headings, notes, endnotes and bibliographies are set aside so they don’t distort the measurements.
• Have a PDF or Google Doc? Open it in Word or Google Docs and save or download it as a .docx file.
• Longer is better for the maps. Paragraph-level evidence is most reliable with 20 or more body paragraphs.

Accounts and My analyses

During the private beta, create an account with your invite code to analyze a document. Your analyses belong to your account, so you can open them from any browser, and no one else can see them.

My analyses lists everything you’ve run, newest first, with links to each report, its Workspace draft and, for revisions, the comparison with the original. Only the account that created an analysis can open it.

Overview: see what stands out

Your report opens on the Overview. Don’t revise yet. First establish what kind of document Prosemetry found, what experience it tends to create, and which patterns stand out.

Writing Identity

Writing Identity names the closest writing population: the group of reference documents the submitted document most resembles, with the variant it leans toward. The most distinctive pattern names the measures where it differs most from that population.

It describes this document, not the writer. It says nothing about intelligence, personality, ability or permanent style, and different tasks often produce different identities.

Writing Galaxy

The Writing Galaxy is a map, not a ranking. Prosemetry compared 5,926 reference documents on 13 measures and found eight recurring populations of writing, each with two variants. The map shows those populations and marks the one your document most resembles, with its correspondence percentage. The flow diagram shows which measurements and behaviours place it there.

• Select a population or variant on the map, or in the list beside it, to read what it describes.
• Hover a measurement or behaviour in the flow diagram to trace where it leads.
• The map is an orientation aid. Correspondence comes from all 13 measures, not from distance on the map. Documents under 750 words of body text can’t be placed.

Revision Priorities

Revision Priorities are Prosemetry’s suggested order of investigation. Each one names a pattern, explains why it may be worth examining, and links to the map that holds the evidence. Priorities are not errors or required changes; the ranking shows where a closer look is likely to be most useful.

Signal Attribution Maps

Signal Attribution Maps (SAMs) connect each document-level result to the paragraphs producing it. They are grouped by theme: Organization & Guidance, Information Structure, Style & Positioning, Vocabulary & Expression, Conceptual Development, and the three Reader Experience contributors.

What a map shows

Each cell is one body paragraph. A stronger colour means more of that signal in that paragraph, compared with the rest of the same document.

• 0 None
• 1 Very low
• 2 Low
• 3 Moderate
• 4 High
• 5 Very high

Click a cell to pin that paragraph’s evidence beside the map while you read. Click another cell to switch.

Next: open Readers to see what the document may ask of readers.

Readers: where might reading get hard?

Before looking for individual passages, read the document from the reader’s side. Reader Experience shows where reading may get harder or easier and why.

Reader Experience

Reader Experience estimates how much effort the document asks of readers as it unfolds, from beginning to end. The ribbon’s thickness shows combined effort; the streams inside it show three contributors:

• Sentence structure: how much readers must hold in mind to connect the parts of a sentence.
• Word predictability: how expected the wording is in context.
• Connections between ideas: how smoothly each sentence continues from its neighbours.

Read the shape first and the details second. Higher demand is not automatically a defect: a methods section may need to be harder than a conclusion.

Keep measurement and meaning apart

Every finding in Prosemetry has three layers.

None of these layers tells you what you must do. Meaning depends on audience, genre, discipline and purpose.

Next: go to Weigh and decide which passages are worth changing.

Weigh: decide what’s worth changing

Once you know where the patterns are and what they may mean for readers, decide what to do about the passages that matter most.

Guided Analytical Review

Guided Analytical Review walks you through the passages where a pattern stands out and the Workspace’s sentence-by-sentence check also finds something to look at, one at a time. For each passage it explains what Prosemetry observed, what readers may encounter, how that interacts with purpose, and where it occurs. Then you decide:

Your decisions are saved with the analysis, so they’re still there on another visit or another device when you’re signed in. They also appear beside the matching paragraphs in the Workspace.

Next: take the passages you chose to revise into the Workspace.

Revise: change the document for a reason

Before changing a passage, read its evidence, the paragraph itself, and the paragraphs before and after it. Name the effect you want readers to experience, then make one or two focused changes.

The Workspace

The Workspace is where you revise. Your document is on one side and Prosemetry’s findings for the selected paragraph are on the other, including any Guided Analytical Review decisions.

• Edit paragraph by paragraph. Changed paragraphs are marked, and you can compare each with its original or restore it at any time.
• Save your document. Drafts are saved with the analysis, so you can come back later. Ctrl or Cmd+S saves.
• Export the revised draft as .docx or .txt, or a revision report listing each changed paragraph with its comparison, decision, note and linked findings.
• Analyze as Draft 2 (then Draft 3, and so on) runs a new analysis of your saved edits and takes you to the comparison when it finishes. The draft you edited stays exactly as it was.

Compare: did the revision do what you intended?

Choose Analyze as Draft 2 in the Workspace. When the new analysis finishes, the Compare page shows the two drafts side by side:

• At a glance: how many review points, priorities and placements changed.
• Revision Priorities before and after, each marked as no longer a top priority, new, or still a priority.
• Changed paragraphs with your edits highlighted word by word, plus how each paragraph’s reader demand moved.
• Measures for the whole document, before and after.

The revision gets its own full report and appears in My analyses, linked to the original.

Look at the passages you meant to change before the wider numbers:

• Did the targeted paragraph become clearer?
• Did the intended reader experience improve?
• Did the change create a new problem nearby?
• Did the Writing Identity shift unexpectedly?
• Does the revised version simply read better?

Next: judge the passages you changed on purpose. Treat wider score movement as context, not as the definition of success.

Evaluation

What success looks like

A good Prosemetry session usually looks like this:

• You identify one or two meaningful patterns.
• You investigate the evidence behind them.
• You make a small number of focused revisions.
• The revised document serves its audience and purpose better.
• You understand more clearly how the document works.

Success doesn’t require improving every metric, eliminating every intense passage, or moving toward a particular Writing Identity or population.

Boundaries

What Prosemetry can’t tell you

Prosemetry measures patterns. It cannot determine:

• whether a document is objectively good or bad, or must be revised;
• who or what wrote a document;
• whether one Writing Identity or population is better than another;
• whether a metric should always go up or down;
• whether a revision improves factual accuracy or the validity of an argument;
• whether every reader will experience a passage the same way.

Prosemetry provides evidence, context and possible interpretations. You decide what, if anything, to do.

Plain-language dictionary

Terms and concepts

You don’t need specialist knowledge to use the report. Each term below explains what is measured, what higher and lower levels may suggest, and the most useful question to ask. No measure is automatically good or bad; its meaning depends on audience, purpose, genre and where it occurs.

No terms match that search.

Avoid

Common mistakes

• Treating Writing Identity as a permanent label.
• Treating Signal Attribution Maps as error maps.
• Comparing intensity levels across different measures.
• Revising only to move a score.
• Reading highlighted paragraphs without their surrounding context.
• Making broad changes before working through Revision Priorities.
• Assuming every high-intensity passage should be reduced.

Workflow summary

Checklist

1. Read the Overview and Writing Identity.
2. Look at the Writing Galaxy, then Readers, and ask whether they fit the document’s purpose.
3. Read the highest-ranked Revision Priority.
4. Open its Signal Attribution Map and pin the strongest paragraph.
5. Read the evidence together with the surrounding paragraphs.
6. Work through Weigh and record a decision for each passage.
7. Make one or two purposeful revisions in the Workspace and save the draft.
8. Choose Analyze as Draft 2 (the button names the next draft), then check the passages you changed on the Compare page.

Teaching and coaching

For instructors and writing center tutors

In classrooms, writing centers and coaching sessions, Prosemetry works best as a starting point for conversation about rhetoric, not as an automated grader.

• Before the session: the writer reads the Overview and Readers, then picks one or two passages to discuss.
• During the session: writer and tutor read the evidence together, talk about audience and purpose, and record decisions in Weigh.
• After the session: the writer revises selectively in the Workspace, analyzes the revision, and compares the targeted passages.

Prosemetry can find patterns and provide evidence. The conversation about meaning, audience and purpose still belongs to people.