Writing types and benchmarks

Inkbreaker supports nine writing types, each with its own set of benchmarks: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Screenwriting, Journalism, Technical Writing, Copywriting, Blogging, Worldbuilding.

When you select a writing type for an exercise, all your scores are measured against the benchmarks for that type. The same text can produce different results depending on the writing type you picked, because what good writing looks like is genuinely different across types.

How benchmarks differ, with examples

Poetry suppresses sentence-based metrics. Average sentence length, sentence length variation, syntactic depth, and dialogue ratio are not relevant to poetry, so they are not shown.

Screenwriting has a higher passive voice tolerance, up to 40 percent. Action lines in screenplay format are conventionally passive, so holding screenwriters to fiction benchmarks for passive voice would be inaccurate.

Technical writing tolerates high repetition scores. Consistent terminology is a feature of good technical writing, not a flaw.

Reading level divergence

When the Flesch-Kincaid grade level and the Coleman-Liau reading level diverge by more than two grade levels, Inkbreaker shows a note explaining the discrepancy. The two formulas measure different things (syllables versus character counts), so they can disagree on complex or unusual vocabulary.

See how your writing type is graded

On any exercise detail page there is a "How [writing type] is graded" collapsible section. It explains which metrics are shown, which are suppressed, and what the benchmarks are for that type.