Estimate how formal or informal your text sounds. Looks at slang, contractions, pronouns, sentence length, passive structure, and Latin-root vocabulary. Includes target presets (academic / business / casual).
Built and maintained by Paul Clark, Redmoon Software
Use to match tone to audience — academic submissions, business proposals, conference talks, or marketing emails. The target selector gives you an instant fit check.
Where lexical density measures information packing and readability measures grade level, formality measures *register* — a third independent axis.
Formality is a 0–100 score combining slang count, contraction count, first/second-person pronoun rate, passive voice frequency, formal markers ("furthermore", "consequently"), and average word length.
The target selector adjusts which range the score should fall into — academic (70–100), business (50–80), or casual (0–45).
Suggestions are generated when your text falls outside the target range, focusing on the most impactful adjustments.
It blends slang count, contractions, first/second-person pronouns, sentence length, passive voice, and Latin-root vocabulary into a single 0–100 score.
Academic ~70–100, business ~50–80, casual ~0–45. The target selector adjusts the suggestion thresholds.
Not yet — the slang and formal-marker lists are baked in. Submit feedback if you have a list for a specific genre.
Input
Hey! Just wanted to let you know we're gonna ship the update next week. Pretty cool, right?
Output
Formality: 14 / 100 — Very casual.
Slang ("gonna", "cool"), heavy contractions, multiple first-person pronouns, and a casual hook all drive the score into the very-casual band.
Formality is estimated from markers that reliably track register: contractions, first- and second-person pronouns, phrasal verbs and colloquial vocabulary pull informal; nominalisation, Latinate vocabulary, longer noun phrases and impersonal constructions pull formal.
The output is a position on a scale, not a grade. There is no correct formality — only formality that matches the audience and the medium, and the same content is wrong at both extremes for different readers.
The failure the score catches best is drift. A document that opens conversationally and turns institutional halfway through — usually where the writer switched to text adapted from another source — reads as two documents stitched together, and readers register that as untrustworthy without identifying why.
Formality creep is the common direction, particularly in anything reviewed by several people, because each round of edits tends to add hedging and nominalisation. Checking a document against an earlier draft is the fastest way to see it happening.
% content words vs. function words.
Text analysisVocabulary variety — type‑token ratio.
Text analysisTotal + per‑word syllable counts.
Text analysisHighlight passive sentences in your writing.