How Shaxpir Does Linguistics
Benji Smith
Apr 14, 2025
The Shaxpir 5 release reintroduces a suite of linguistic analysis features that we removed from the platform back in August 2023, following the shuttering of our Prosecraft.io project.
In previous versions of Shaxpir, you could measure the vividness, sentiment, and passive voice of your writing, and then compare those measurements with the works of authors you admire on the Prosecraft website, where we published analysis and snippets from thousands of popular books.
For example, Shaxpir would count the number of “vivid words” in your manuscript, and score each of them according to the intensity of their vividness, and then it would give you a link to the Prosecraft website, telling you “Your book is in the 80th percentile for vividness, compared to all the books in our library!”
Then you could look through all those books and read clippings from the most vivid and most passive pages of each one. By comparing your manuscript to authors you admired, you'd get a better sense for your own writing style, and you could adapt accordingly.
But we didn’t have licenses to reproduce clippings from any of those books, and a group of authors raised objections to the project. We listened to their legitimate concerns and, at their request, we shut the whole thing down in August of 2023.
At the same time, we pulled all the related features from the Shaxpir writing platform. The linguistic analysis in Shaxpir was deeply intertwined with the scoring, ranking, and comparison of books on the Prosecraft website, and it would take us some time to disentangle those features.
Now that some time has passed, we've had a chance to rebuild those linguistic features for the Shaxpir writing platform, without the Prosecraft site and its snippets, percentile rankings, and comparisons.
With the release of Shaxpir 5, we’re thrilled to be able to re-introduce these features back into the Shaxpir writing platform.
And we’d like to tell you how the actual linguistic analysis is performed, so that you can get a better understanding of our process. With the launch of Shaxpir 5, we're creating a new Guidebook with helpful tutorials and articles, and these linguistic explainers are some of the first entries in that book: