Most writing advice is subjective, which makes it hard to act on. "Be concise" is true and useless. What helps is knowing which specific, measurable properties of a piece of text make it harder to read — because those can be found, and found quickly.
This is about the editing pass: what to look for, in what order, and which parts a tool can genuinely tell you.
Readability scores: useful, within limits
Readability formulas estimate how difficult a text is, mostly from sentence length and word length. The Flesch Reading Ease score is the best known — higher means easier, with 60–70 considered plain English suitable for a general audience.
Run a piece through Readability Score and you get a number in seconds. It is worth being clear about what that number does and does not mean.
What it detects reliably: long sentences and long words. That is genuinely useful, because those are the two most common causes of dense prose, and writers are poor judges of their own sentence length.
What it cannot detect: whether you are making sense. The formula counts syllables; it does not read. "The cat sat on the mat" scores brilliantly. So does a paragraph of confident nonsense made of short words. Meanwhile a clear, well-structured technical explanation may score "difficult" purely because the subject has long technical terms, and replacing them with shorter vague ones would make it worse.
Treat the score as a smoke alarm. A bad score means look closer. A good score does not mean the writing is good.
Sentence length is the highest-leverage fix
If you change one thing, change this. Comprehension drops sharply as sentences grow, and the mechanism is simple: the reader has to hold everything in working memory until the sentence resolves.
The goal is not uniformly short sentences — that reads like a manual. It is varied sentence length, averaging somewhere in the teens. Short sentences after long ones land hard. A page of twelve-word sentences is monotonous; a page of forty-word sentences is exhausting.
Practical method: find your longest sentences and look for the joint. Most over-long sentences are two complete thoughts held together by "and", "but" or a comma splice. Splitting at the joint usually costs nothing and improves both halves.
Word Counter gives you counts for words, sentences and paragraphs, which is enough to spot when your average has drifted upward.
Find the words you overuse
Every writer has crutch words, and none of us can see our own. They feel natural precisely because we reach for them constantly.
Word Frequency counts them. Ignore the top of the list — "the", "a", "of" are supposed to dominate. The interesting part is the content words that appear far more often than the subject requires.
Common offenders:
- Hedges — "quite", "fairly", "somewhat", "rather", "I think", "arguably". These dilute. If something is true, say it. If it is uncertain, say why rather than softening it.
- Intensifiers — "very", "really", "extremely", "incredibly". "Very important" is weaker than "important" because it signals the writer did not trust the word to carry weight.
- Filler openers — "It is important to note that", "In order to", "The fact that". These can almost always be deleted whole without loss.
- Your personal tic. Everyone has one. The frequency list will find it, and once you have seen it you cannot unsee it.
For business writing, also watch for abstract nouns built from verbs — "utilisation", "implementation", "facilitation". These make prose heavy. "We implemented a solution for the facilitation of onboarding" is "we made onboarding easier".
The duplication problem
In long documents, particularly ones edited by several people, the same point often appears in two places in slightly different words. Readers notice, and it undermines confidence in the whole piece.
Duplicate Line Remover catches exact repeats, which is common in lists, bullet points and FAQ documents that have grown by accretion.
For near-duplicates, Text Diff comparing two sections side by side is the fastest way to see whether they genuinely say different things.
Syllables, rhythm and names
Syllable Counter is useful in places people do not expect. Readability formulas use syllable counts, so it explains why a passage scored badly. But it also matters for anything read aloud or seen at a glance — headlines, taglines, product names, slide titles, video scripts.
Text that is read aloud has different constraints from text that is read silently. Reading your draft out loud remains the single most effective editing technique ever devised, because your mouth stumbles exactly where a reader's attention will.
Consistency is invisible when right, glaring when wrong
Inconsistency is a quiet credibility problem. If a document says "e-mail" in one place and "email" in another, or switches between "sign up", "signup" and "sign-up", readers register it as carelessness even when they cannot say what bothered them.
- Find & Replace for systematic corrections across a long document.
- Case Converter for headings — decide between title case and sentence case, then apply it everywhere rather than leaving a mix.
Pick a convention for the recurring items — product names, capitalisation, serial commas, number formatting — and apply it mechanically. Being consistently unusual reads better than being inconsistently correct.
Structure does more than sentences
Most people read by scanning first and committing second. Structure is what makes scanning possible.
- Descriptive headings. "How pricing works" beats "Details". A reader should be able to read only your headings and know what the piece covers.
- One idea per paragraph, with the point in the first sentence. Readers who skim read first sentences.
- Lists for genuinely parallel items — not as a way to avoid writing transitions. A page of nothing but bullets has no argument.
- Front-load the answer. Most professional writing is not a mystery novel. Put the conclusion first and the reasoning after.
An editing pass that works
The mistake is trying to fix everything in one read. Separate passes, each looking for one thing, are faster and catch more:
- Structure. Read only the headings. Do they tell the story in order? Fix this before touching a sentence — reorganising later wastes any line editing you have done.
- Cut. Remove whole paragraphs that repeat or wander. This is where the biggest improvements are, and it is the pass people skip because it hurts.
- Sentences. Split the long ones. Check the readability score before and after.
- Words. Run word frequency, kill the hedges and intensifiers.
- Consistency. Terminology, capitalisation, formatting.
- Read aloud. Last. You will find things the other five passes missed.
Leave time between writing and editing if you possibly can. An hour helps; a day helps more. You cannot see your own prose clearly while the intended meaning is still fresh, because you read what you meant rather than what you wrote.
The honest limitation
No tool can tell you whether a piece is worth reading. Scores and counts find mechanical problems — the length, the repetition, the inconsistency — and mechanical problems are worth finding, because they are the ones you cannot see in your own work.
Whether the argument holds, whether the examples are right, whether it is aimed at the reader you actually have: that part is still yours.
The readability scorer, word counter, word frequency, text diff and find and replace tools all run free in your browser on ZeeSharp.