Your crutch word, circled in red pen

Every writer has a crutch word. Mine shows up four times a paragraph when I'm tired, and I never see it while I'm typing. That's the thing about your own prose: you read what you meant, not what's on the page.

Lexiscope is a text playground that shows you what's on the page. Paste a draft (or type into it directly) and three things update live on every keystroke: a ranked bar chart of your most-used words, a sentence-by-sentence tone strip, and readability meters. The single most frequent word gets drawn in editor's red, circled like a teacher got to your manuscript first. It is very hard to keep overusing a word that's glowing at you.

Numbers you can feel

Plenty of tools will score your writing after the fact: run report, read table, forget table. The design bet in Lexiscope is that live numbers change behavior in a way reports don't. Reword one sentence and you watch the Flesch Reading Ease meter slide, the bars re-rank themselves (D3 data joins animate the shuffle), and the sentiment needle sweep. You develop a feel for what a wording change costs, the way you develop an ear for music by hearing it, not by reading reviews.

The tone gauge is lexicon-based sentiment with negation and intensifier handling, so "not good" lands negative and "very good" lands more positive than plain "good." Per-sentence coloring means you can spot the paragraph where your cheerful product update quietly turns defensive. The readability pair (Flesch Reading Ease plus Flesch-Kincaid grade level) is color-coded easy, medium, or hard, next to word count, sentence count, and reading time.

Nothing you type leaves the page

The part I care most about: there is no server. The entire analysis pipeline is TypeScript running in your browser tab. No API call, no account, no "we take your privacy seriously" banner over a network tab full of your unpublished draft. Close the tab and the draft is gone; share it deliberately with the ?text= URL if you want a colleague to see the same analysis.

One honest limitation, since this blog does honest: lexicon sentiment is a blunt instrument. It reads words, not meaning, so sarcasm and irony sail past it. It's a smoke detector for tone, not a literary critic, and it's presented as exactly that.

The design is its own small pleasure: warm paper background, serif manuscript editor, Fraunces headings, and a one-click night mode. It reads like a page, not a dashboard, which was the point. Tools for writing shouldn't feel like ops consoles.

Try it

Paste in the last thing you published. Check what word comes up red. Then rewrite one flabby sentence and watch the grade-level meter move. If the red word surprises you, that's the app paying for itself in the first minute.