The writing inspector

Open a chapter or scene and the inspector on the right stops being a static summary — it becomes six tabs, each answering a different question about the section you're writing.

The tab bar is icon-only; the caption beneath it names whichever tab is selected. In order: Synopsis, In Scene, Notes, Metadata, Snapshots, Readability.

Synopsis

A free-text Synopsis field — your own summary of the section, not derived from anything else. A scene adds two more fields here: Purpose (why this scene exists in the book) and Scene Goal (what the point-of-view character is trying to get out of it).

Conflict and Outcome are not on this tab. Those two, plus Goal again, live in the Five C's tool instead — see The analysis tools — so a scene's dramatic shape stays in one place rather than spread across two.

In Scene

Everything Sgeulai currently knows appears in this section — the cast, in effect. It's built from the record's own fields (POV character, characters present, primary location, and any events, plot items or arcs it advances) plus every entity mentioned by a wikilink in the prose, each labelled with its role: POV, Present, Location, Event, Plot, Arc, or simply Linked. Click a name to see its summary.

Empty here means exactly what it says: nothing is set in Metadata and nothing is wikilinked yet. This tab is read-only in itself — it reflects Metadata and your prose rather than editing anything directly.

Notes

The same Author Notes field every Story Bible record has, scoped to this one chapter or scene. Not a separate "chapter notes" concept — just this record's own notes, the way you'd write them for a character or location.

Metadata

What's here depends on what you're looking at:

Node	Fields
Scene	Status, word count with an editable target and progress bar, POV character, characters present, primary location.
Chapter	Chapter number, part/act name, word count.
Either	Keywords, shown as chips when the record has any.

Setting the POV character, cast and location here is what feeds the In Scene tab and the cast-detection several analysis tools depend on — it is worth filling in even when you'd rather just write.

Snapshots

Take Snapshot captures this section's prose exactly as it stands, labelled and timestamped. The list below it holds every snapshot, newest first, each with Preview (a side-by-side compare) and Restore. Restoring always takes one more snapshot first — "before a restore" — so undoing a restore is itself just another restore.

Sgeulai also takes snapshots on its own, automatically, immediately before letting something rewrite a section's prose in bulk — a Find & Replace pass, an AI re-analysis, a scene split. See The Tools menu for Compact Document…, which is how old automatic snapshots get cleared out once you don't need them anymore; a snapshot you took yourself is never touched by it.

Readability

A statistical read on the prose, not a judgment of it. Every number on this tab comes from Sgeulai counting words, sentences and syllables in your own text as you type — nothing is sent anywhere, nothing is compared against anyone else's writing, and no AI is involved at any point. It's the same kind of insight a copy editor's rule of thumb gives you, just computed instead of eyeballed: not "is this good," but "here is what this passage is actually doing, structurally, right now."

It needs a running start — type at least 30 words and the panels appear; below that there simply isn't enough text yet for a sentence-length average or a syllable count to mean anything.

Reading it as a whole

Panel	What it measures	What it's telling you
Reading Ease	The Flesch Reading Ease score, 0–100, from average sentence length and syllables per word.	Higher means easier to parse at a glance. Shown alongside an estimated reading time, based on a fixed 238 words a minute.
At a Glance	Word, sentence and paragraph counts.	The plain scale of what you've written — no interpretation, just the totals.
Word Length	Average syllables and letters per word, plus a distribution of word lengths across the whole passage.	A passage built from short, plain words reads very differently from one leaning on long or technical ones, even at the same sentence length — this is where that shows up.
Syllable Distribution	The share of "complex" words — three or more syllables — and a chart of syllable counts across the passage.	A rising share of complex words is usually what makes a Reading Ease score drop, so this is the "why" behind that number.
Sentence Rhythm	Average sentence length, and the split between short, medium and long sentences.	A passage that's all one length reads as monotone even when every sentence, alone, is fine. This is the fastest way to spot that without rereading the whole thing aloud.
Paragraph Density	Sentences and words per paragraph.	Dense paragraphs slow a reader down on the page before they've read a word of one — useful to know if a section is meant to feel breathless or unhurried.
Grade Level	Flesch-Kincaid Grade and Gunning Fog — two independent estimates of the US school grade a reader would need to follow the passage on a first read.	The two rarely agree exactly; where they do agree is a stronger signal than either alone. Neither is a judgment of the writing's quality.
Top Repeated Words	Your own most frequent words in this passage (ordinary stopwords like "the" and "and" excluded).	Catches the tics you can't hear in your own head — a "just" or "suddenly" that crept into every third paragraph is much easier to spot in a list than in the prose itself.

Section, part, or whole manuscript

Open a chapter or scene and this tab is scoped to just that section's prose, recalculating on every change you make — there's no separate "run the analysis" step. Click a manuscript or part title in the binder instead of a chapter or scene, and the same panel appears scoped to everything underneath it, rebuilt each time you switch which manuscript or part is selected rather than on every keystroke elsewhere in the book.

None of these numbers are a target to hit. A grade-level score that reads "low" for literary prose is not a defect — the metrics exist to show you what a sentence actually does, not what it should do.

Readability is about how a passage reads, sentence by sentence — it says nothing about how long a chapter runs compared to the rest of the book. That's a separate question, answered by the Pacing tool instead; see The analysis tools.

The comments panel

Not a tab on this inspector — a separate toggle in the editor's own toolbar (the speech-bubble icon, with a badge counting open comments). See Writing aids in the editor for what a comment can hold and how it links back to the Story Bible.