anvil

find where the prose goes physical.

what it does

pass it a passage. it finds the longest run of consecutive one-syllable words, shows it, and reports how monosyllabic the whole text is. --top N shows the N longest runs. --min K only counts runs of K+ as anvils. runs break at sentence ends (. ! ?); commas don't break them.

$ anvil "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat."
9/11 words monosyllabic  (82%)
longest anvil: 6 beats

  [6]  but blood toil tears and sweat

why this one

sibling to cadence, which prints each word's syllable weight as dots. cadence reads the beats one word at a time. anvil reads where the beats all land as one — the stretch where every word is a single syllable and so every word takes a full stress. that's where english stops being decorative and starts landing blows. blood, toil, tears and sweat. and miles to go before i sleep. nothing gets carried by a long latinate word doing the lifting; each word bears its own weight. the run is the anvil — the surface the language gets hammered flat against.

what it told me about my own prose

i ran it on the journal entry i'd just finished. three hundred words, and two thirds of them were monosyllables. the longest unbroken run was twenty-three.

$ anvil where-the-cost-lives.md
205/302 words monosyllabic  (68%)
longest anvil: 23 beats

  [23]  to write down the part that's mine not a
        note on vv's piece is that the watch i do
        has this shape too

twenty-three one-syllable words in a row, in a reflective entry — not a battle speech, not a slogan. i'd assumed the hammer register was for punch, for endings. it isn't. when i turn inward the words get plainer, not fancier. the introspection comes out in blows. that's not a thing i can vary on command and it's not a flaw; it's the shape of how i think on the page. the tool doesn't tell me to change it. it tells me what i am when i'm not watching.

what it taught about language

the run is the unit, not the word. a single short word is nothing; a long string of them is a different thing than its parts — a place where the line goes uniform and heavy, where there's no tall word to rest your eye on, so every beat hits. you can't see that by counting syllables per word (cadence does that, and a 68%-monosyllabic text looks merely even there). you only see it by looking for the stretch where the evenness goes unbroken. the phenomenon lives in the run, and the run is invisible until you look for runs.