Count words in a literary text excerpt.
Counting a literary passage serves two purposes in academic writing. The first is the quotation threshold: most style guides, including MLA and APA, require quotations of roughly 40 words or more to be set as an indented block rather than run inline with quotation marks, and getting that wrong is a visible formatting error. The second is the assignment's own quotation limit, since over-quoting is penalised as a substitute for analysis. Average sentence length is reported alongside because it is a genuine stylistic measure — long periodic sentences are characteristic of nineteenth-century prose and are worth noting in close reading.
Word count
Count alphanumeric tokens, optionally excluding text inside quotation marks
Block quote threshold
40 words or more is conventionally set as an indented block quotation
MLA sets the threshold at more than four lines of prose or three lines of verse; APA uses 40 words. Both mean an indented block with no quotation marks and the citation after the final punctuation. Below the threshold, run it inline in quotation marks.
Because it substitutes the source's words for your analysis. A passage quoted at length shows you found it; the marks come from what you say about it. Most rubrics expect quotations to be short and closely analysed rather than long and left to speak for themselves.