NarraDive is an offline workbench for close reading. You bring the text, you build the interpretation, and every word stays on your iPhone.
No accounts. No cloud. No tracking. Nothing ever leaves the device.
HOW IT WORKS
1. Add a book or a passage by hand. Title, author, and the full text you want to work with. Type it or paste it in. A live word count tells you how much you have entered.
2. Build Readings on top of that text. A Reading is your own interpretation: a title, a hypothesis you are willing to defend, a confidence level from 0 to 100 percent, and a list of evidence lines quoted straight from the passage. Changed your mind next week? Write a second Reading. The Readings tab gathers every one you have made, across every text, sorted by confidence.
3. Open Insights to see the shape of the prose. Three counts, measured directly from the text you typed:
- Tensions: sentences longer than 25 words, where the syntax strains
- Echoes: words of five letters or more that return three times or more
- Silences: paragraphs shorter than 15 words, the structural gaps
Tap through to read every passage behind a count.
4. Open Threads for two structural views. Character Web collects capitalized names the text carries and counts each mention. Event Timeline lays your paragraphs out in order along a vertical line, so the sequence of the narrative is visible at a glance.
WHAT IT DOES NOT DO
NarraDive never interprets on your behalf. There is no automated verdict, no generated summary, no machine opinion of any kind. The three counts are plain deterministic arithmetic over the words you entered: sentence length, word frequency, paragraph size. Nothing more. The reading is yours, and the app only holds the scaffolding steady while you build it.
WHO IT IS FOR
- Literature and English students working through a set text
- Teachers preparing seminar and discussion material
- Book clubs that like to argue about meaning with receipts
- Writers taking apart their own drafts
- Anyone who reads twice and wants the second pass on record
HONEST ABOUT SCOPE
- Fully offline. Zero network requests, at any time, for any reason.
- No file import. No EPUB, no PDF, no scanning. You enter the text yourself, which keeps the app free of anything you did not choose to put there.
- No bundled library and no supplied content. Start with a public domain passage you type in, or with your own writing.
- No sync, no accounts, no sharing.
- No purchases, no subscriptions, no advertising.
- Everything is stored locally on this iPhone. Clearing your Readings or your library removes them permanently.
DESIGNED FOR THE LONG SESSION
A dark reading surface, warm accents, large type for titles and quiet grey for the details. Built for iPhone, for the hour you spend with one difficult paragraph.
Add your first passage and start reading closely.
