Poetry tools

Inkbreaker has two tools for working in verse: the Stress Pattern Visualizer, which scans a line’s meter, and the Rhyme Scheme Tagger, which labels a poem’s rhymes and names its form. Both are Pro tools. Both read your draft and leave it exactly as you wrote it.

You can open either one two ways:

• On its own page, from Tools then Poetry.
• Inside the editor, from the tools panel, when your piece’s writing type is Poetry.

In the editor panel the tools work on your live draft, so you can scan the line you just wrote. On their own pages you can type or paste any text, or load one of your saved pieces.

Stress Pattern Visualizer

Scansion is the old practice of marking which syllables a line stresses and reading the rhythm that falls out. The Stress Pattern Visualizer does it as you type. It marks every syllable as stressed (/) or unstressed (u), then reads the pattern back as a meter: five iambs in a row make iambic pentameter, a run of trochees reads as trochaic.

Each line shows its own closest meter beneath it, and a summary at the top names the meter that runs through the poem.

Trust your ear

English stress depends on how a word is actually said, and the tool has no pronunciation dictionary. So the marks are an estimate, not a verdict. A syllable the tool is unsure about is shown with a dotted underline.

When a mark looks wrong, tap it. It flips, and the meter for that line recomputes around your reading. The point is to surface the rhythm you can then correct by ear, not to overrule it.

The panel in the editor scans the first few lines so it stays quick; open the full tool to scan a longer poem (up to twenty lines at a time).

Rhyme Scheme Tagger

The Rhyme Scheme Tagger groups the line endings of a poem into a scheme, the ABAB or AABB pattern a reader hears, and labels each line with its letter. Lines that share an ending sound share a letter and a color. A line that does not rhyme with another is marked x.

When the whole pattern matches a known form, the tool names it: a couplet, a ballad stanza, a rhyme royal, a Shakespearean or Petrarchan sonnet, and others. A partial match is named as such.

Near rhymes

Not every rhyme is exact. “Shape” and “keep” share a shape without sharing a sound: that is a near rhyme, or slant rhyme. The tagger marks near rhymes with a dashed outline so a deliberate slant rhyme does not read as a miss.

Click any rhyme label to highlight every line that shares it, which makes a long or interlocking scheme easy to follow.

What these tools do not do

Neither tool writes or rewrites your poem. They do not score it, grade it, or suggest changes to your words. They read what you wrote and show you its structure, so the craft decisions stay yours.

Both 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.