Seeing Your Writing Differently
Writer’s Lens is a set of tools that help you see your own writing in new ways. Color cadence to reveal rhythm. Highlight repetition. Make the invisible patterns visible.
I built this for Anthropic’s “Built with Claude Sonnet 4.5” challenge, inspired by a simple idea: once you can see rhythm, voice, and structure, you can deliberately improve them.
The Inspiration
Gary Provost has a famous quote about sentence rhythm:
“This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety…”
Reading this gave me a revelation: what if we could see these patterns in our writing? Not just read them, but visualize rhythm, repetition, and cadence in real-time?
How It Works
The app uses Apple’s Natural Language framework for tokenization and linguistic analysis. As you write, different lenses reveal different patterns:
- Cadence View: Color-codes sentence length to show rhythm
- Repetition Highlights: Makes repeated words and phrases visible
- Structure Analysis: Reveals the underlying patterns in your prose
Building It
The development was a collaboration with Claude:
- Concept Discussion: Started with a conversation about how to make this visualization a reality
- Technical Foundation: Learned about Natural Language framework capabilities for tokenization and linguistic analysis
- Research Phase: Used Claude Research to analyze examples from my favorite books and understand how they could apply to this framework
- Standing on Shoulders: Found freewrite by @FarzaTV, which meant I didn’t have to build an editor from scratch. Such a thoughtfully designed app!
- Aesthetic Choices: Used Flexoki by @kepano for the color palette—a cohesive, warm, inky aesthetic that felt right for a writing tool
Try It
The app is available to try. It’s changed how I think about my own writing—less about rules, more about seeing patterns and making deliberate choices about rhythm and flow.