Poetry tools

Inkbreaker has four tools for working in verse. The Poetry Studio is the main one: it reads a poem on every level at once and can read it aloud. The Rhyme Finder finds a word that rhymes and fits, the Form Atlas checks your poem against a fixed form, and the Revision Lens reads a draft for what to sharpen. Every one reads your draft and leaves it exactly as you wrote it.

You can open each one two ways:

• On its own page, from Tools then Poetry, where you type or paste a poem or load one of your saved pieces.
• Inside the editor, from the tools panel, when your piece’s writing type is Poetry, where they work on your live draft.

Poetry Studio

The Poetry Studio lays meter, rhyme, sound, and form over your draft at once, live as you write. Each is a layer you can turn on or off.

• Syllables: the count for each line sits in the margin.
• Stress: each word shows its beat underneath as dots, a filled dot for a stressed syllable, so the rhythm lines up with the words. A note names the meter that runs through the poem, like iambic pentameter.
• Rhyme: lines that rhyme share a letter and a color in the margin.
• Sound: repeated sounds light up over the words, alliteration on an opening consonant, assonance on a vowel, consonance on a closing consonant, and sibilance in a run of soft s sounds.
• Form: pick a fixed form and each line is checked against it. An info button opens a short guide on how to write that form.

A legend below the controls says what each mark means.

Hear it

The Studio can also play the poem. Read aloud speaks it line by line in your browser’s own voice. Tap the rhythm plays a soft click track of the stressed and unstressed beats at a tempo you set, with a start and stop. Both are made on your own device; no audio is sent anywhere.

The Studio’s meter and rhyme readings are estimates. For rhymes checked against a pronouncing dictionary, use the Rhyme Finder.

Rhyme Finder

The Rhyme Finder helps you find the next rhyme. Give it a word and it returns the words that rhyme with it, drawn from a pronouncing dictionary. The matches are by sound, not spelling: through finds blue and knew, and cough does not turn up under bough.

Perfect rhymes and near rhymes come back in separate lists. Filter by syllable count to keep only the rhymes that fit the line you are writing.

On its own page, click a rhyme to copy it. Inside the editor, click a rhyme to drop it straight into your poem at the cursor.

Form Atlas

The Form Atlas is a library of fixed forms, from the haiku and the sonnet to the villanelle and the sestina. Pick one and it shows the shape at a glance: how many lines, where they rhyme, how many syllables each line carries, and which lines repeat.

Then check your poem against it. The Atlas reads your draft line by line and flags what does not yet fit: a line that runs long on syllables, a rhyme that has drifted, a refrain that has changed. It also tracks the two refrains that thread through a villanelle and the six end words that rotate through a sestina in a fixed order.

Inside the editor, the Form Atlas can drop a labeled scaffold for a form into your draft, a blank line for each line of the form with its syllable count, rhyme letter, or refrain noted.

Revision Lens

The Revision Lens reads a draft for three things: line breaks, the senses, and cliches.

First, line breaks. Each line is marked as end-stopped, finishing on a natural pause, or running on into the next line, which is called enjambment.

Second, the senses. The lens counts how many words reach each of the five senses and shows which senses the poem has touched and which it has not.

Third, cliches. Any worn phrase the draft leans on is flagged, and if the diction runs abstract the lens says so, with a nudge toward concrete images. It never rewrites a word.

Which language a poem is in

The Rhyme Finder and the Revision Lens each have a Language menu. Left on Auto, they tell the language from the poem’s script, and otherwise go by the language you use Inkbreaker in. Pick a language yourself when Auto would guess wrong, for example a Spanish poem written while you use Inkbreaker in English.

The Rhyme Finder works in all ten of Inkbreaker’s languages. The Revision Lens reads senses and cliches in those ten too. For a poem in any other language, choose Another language: the lens then shows only the line breaks.

What these tools do not do

None of these tools writes or rewrites your poem. They do not use a language model, and they do not grade your verse or suggest words to change. They read what you wrote, show you its structure, and let you hear it.

The poetry tools sit alongside the rest of Inkbreaker’s writing tools. If you write in other forms too, see the worldbuilding tools and the rest of the Tools page.