Blog
Guides to the math behind the tools — readability formulas, pricing your work, sizing a build, and planning a game world.
When every sentence starts with "The": fixing monotonous openings
Repetitive sentence openings make prose drone even when each sentence is fine on its own. How to spot the pattern, why it happens, and how to measure your opening variety.
How long should a paragraph be? Counting sentences for rhythm
Paragraph length controls the pace and breathability of your writing. How to count sentences per paragraph, spot the wall-of-text outliers, and edit for rhythm.
EFLAW: the readability score built for non-native English readers
Most readability formulas count syllables and assume a native reader. McAlpine’s EFLAW takes a different angle — it counts the short words that trip up ESL audiences. Here is how the score works, why it correlates with real comprehension, and how to use it.
Word frequency analysis: seeing what your text actually overuses
A word frequency count is the simplest text-analysis tool there is, and one of the most revealing. Here is how stopword filtering changes the picture, why the percentages matter more than the counts, and what to do with the table once you have it.
Lexical diversity: what TTR measures, and why you need MATTR
Type-token ratio is the classic measure of how varied your vocabulary is — and it has one notorious flaw that makes it almost useless for comparing texts of different lengths. Here is how TTR works, why it sinks as text grows, and how MATTR fixes it.
Why your meta tags get cut off: pixels, not characters
Google truncates titles and descriptions by pixel width, not character count — which is why two snippets of the same length can be cut differently. Here are the real limits, why the rules of thumb mislead, and how to write tags that survive.
Sentence length variety: the rhythm metric that makes prose readable
Average sentence length only tells half the story. The standard deviation — how much your sentences vary in length — is what separates flat, monotonous writing from prose with rhythm. Here is how to measure and use it.
Echoes: how to catch the words you accidentally repeat
The same word reused a few sentences apart is one of the most common and invisible writing flaws. Here is why your brain skips over these echoes, how a proximity finder catches them, and how to fix them without a thesaurus binge.
Very, really, just, basically: how to find and cut filler words
The weak words that quietly bloat your writing — intensifiers, hedges, discourse markers, and qualifiers. What each category does, why it weakens prose, and how to find your worst offenders fast.
Lexical density: the simple ratio that measures how packed your writing is
Lexical density is the share of content words versus function words in your text. What it really measures, the typical ranges for speech and academic prose, and why a high score is not always a good thing.
Why your 280-character tweet is actually too long: weighted counting explained
Twitter does not count characters the way you think. Links always cost 23, emoji and CJK count double, and the 280 limit is really a weighted budget. How it works and how to split a long post into a clean thread.
How syllable counting works (and why it quietly drives your readability scores)
The vowel-group heuristic behind automated syllable counting, the silent-e and -le rules that trip it up, why it lands around 95% accurate, and how syllables feed Flesch, SMOG, and Gunning Fog.
The -ly trap: how to find and fix adverb overload
Why -ly adverbs weaken prose, how an automated detector separates real adverbs from false positives, what adverb rate to target, and a practical editing workflow.
N-grams for writers and SEOs: finding the phrases you repeat
What bigrams and trigrams are, how an n-gram analyzer counts and filters them, why stopword handling and lowercasing matter, and how to use phrase frequency for self-editing and keyword research.
Linsear Write: the readability formula that counts easy and hard words by hand
How Linsear Write scores a 100-word sample by weighting easy (≤2 syllable) and hard (3+ syllable) words, why the Air Force built it for hand-calculation, and when it beats the syllable-average formulas.
FORCAST: the readability formula that ignores sentences entirely
Why FORCAST counts only single-syllable words across a 150-word sample, how it scores text with no real sentences — forms, lists, tests — and when it beats Flesch and SMOG.
The Spache Readability Formula: measuring text for the youngest readers
How Spache scores primary-grade (K–4) text against a list of familiar words, why it beats Flesch and Dale–Chall below fourth grade, and how to read its grade output.
Dale–Chall readability explained: the formula that scores words you actually know
Why Dale–Chall measures vocabulary familiarity instead of syllables, how the 3,000-word familiar list works, what the 3.6365 adjustment does, and when it beats Flesch.
The Automated Readability Index: why counting characters beats counting syllables
How ARI turns characters-per-word and sentence length into a US grade level, why it skips syllables, what the −21.43 constant does, and when to trust it over Flesch.
How a passive voice detector actually works (and when to ignore it)
A passive voice detector hunts for one grammatical pattern: a form of "to be" followed by a past participle. Here is exactly how the matching works, why it both over- and under-flags, and how to use the percentage without letting it bully your prose.