Writing Style & Passive Voice Checker

Nothing here understands what your sentence means. Six patterns run over the draft — a form of to be followed by a participle, words ending in -ly, a list of hedges, a list of filler phrases, nouns built out of verbs, and any sentence past 25 words — and every match is shown to you rather than corrected for you. Writing Style Checker is closer to a highlighter than a grammar checker, which is exactly why it can run on your machine with nothing uploaded.

That trade is worth understanding before you use the counts. A tool that rewrites needs to be right; a tool that highlights only needs to be interesting, and you settle the argument by reading the sentence. Every colour can be switched off on its own, so you can hunt one habit at a time through a long piece.

What Each Colour Flags

• Passive voice catches been determined, was received, be directed and the irregular participles that an -ed rule misses, such as was written and been taken.
• Hedges and intensifiers covers 25 words in the very / really / arguably / materially family, the ones that add emphasis without adding information.
• -ly adverbs skips the 30-odd words that merely look adverbial, so family, reply, monthly and friendly are left alone.
• Nominalisations flags verbs frozen into nouns: implementation, consideration, clarification. About 40 ordinary nouns with the same endings are excluded, question and department among them.
• Filler phrases matches 18 multi-word constructions with a shorter equivalent, from in order to to until such time as.
• Long sentences are listed separately with their word counts rather than highlighted, because a 51-word sentence would otherwise swallow every other mark inside it.

Precision of a Regex, Not a Parser

The draft on screen when the page opens is a committee memo that scores 16 issues across 68 words, or 23.5 per 100, which the verdict reads as Heavy: 6 passives, 5 nominalisations, 3 filler phrases, 1 hedge and one 34-word sentence. Press Load Sample and the next one opens The utilisation of the facility was significantly increased, which shows the overlap rule doing its job. That phrase is one passive hit, not a passive plus a stray adverb, because matches are claimed earliest-first and longest-first and no character is counted twice. The bands are arbitrary but consistent: under 4 issues per 100 words reads Tight, under 9 Workable, and anything above that Heavy.

Not a Substitute for Reading It Aloud

Every pattern here is legitimate somewhere. A passive is the right choice when the actor is genuinely unknown or genuinely irrelevant, a hedge is honest when you are actually uncertain, and a technical noun that ends in -tion is often just the name of the thing. The nominalisation check in particular is suffix matching, so a word outside the exclusion list gets highlighted whether or not it started life as a verb. Drafts longer than 40,000 characters are cut with “Only the first 40,000 characters are checked. The rest is ignored.” Treat the counts as a place to look, never as a score to minimise — prose edited until this tool reports zero is usually worse than the draft it started from.