Free Writing Checker

• Very long sentences: 40 words or more. Most readers lose the thread; split them.
• Long sentences: 30 to 39 words. Worth a second look, not always a problem.
• Passive voice: “was written by”, “has been decided”. Fine when the doer doesn’t matter; weak when it hides who acted.
• Wordy phrases: “in order to”, “due to the fact that”, with the shorter version.
• Adverbs: words such as “quickly” and “extremely”, where a more precise verb or adjective may do the job alone.
• Filler words: “really”, “basically”, “actually”, “kind of”. See the full list of filler words.
• Clichés: “at the end of the day”, “think outside the box”, with a plainer way to say it.
• Repeated words: the same word twice within 15 words, and words typed twice in a row (“the the”).

Each kind has its own colour and line style, so you can tell them apart without relying on colour. Switch kinds on and off to focus on one problem at a time, and tap any highlight to see why it was flagged.

It is honest to say this plainly: this is not a grammar and punctuation checker. It follows fixed rules about style, so it cannot tell whether a comma is in the right place, whether a verb agrees with its subject, or whether you meant “their” or “there”. For those, read the text aloud, use your browser’s spellcheck, and see ourgrammar tips. What it does well is show you the habits that make writing slow to read, so you can fix them before anyone else sees them.

Here is what the checker finds in a short paragraph:

In order to improve results, the survey was redesigned by the team. At the end of the day, the new survey is basically much better.

A revision that deals with all five:

To improve results, the team redesigned the survey. The new version is much better.

Notice that the repeated word was fixed by changing “survey” to “version”, not by reaching for a thesaurus. Sometimes repeating the word is the clearest choice, and that is fine.