Find hedge words ("might", "perhaps", "appears to") that undercut confident writing. Get a confidence score weighted for your domain: marketing, academic, legal, or general.
Built and maintained by Paul Clark, Redmoon Software
Use the hedge-word detector for marketing copy, executive writing, or any context where confidence sells. Inverse use: in academic and legal writing, hedging signals epistemic care — high hedge rates are expected.
Hedge detection is the confidence dimension of the filler / passive / adverb family. Together they form a complete weak-prose audit.
Hedges are words that signal uncertainty: modal verbs (might, could), probability adverbs (perhaps, possibly), and tentative verbs (seems, appears).
The detector counts both single-word hedges and multi-word phrases ("it could be argued", "to some extent").
The confidence score is 100 minus the hedge rate times a domain-specific weight — marketing penalizes hedges heaviest, academic lightest.
Words that signal uncertainty: might, may, could, perhaps, possibly, seems, appears, suggests, somewhat, generally, etc.
No. Academic and legal writing require hedging to signal epistemic care. Marketing and confident persuasion punish it. Set the domain selector accordingly.
Confidence = 100 − (hedge rate × domain weight). Marketing weight is highest (5), academic lowest (1.5).
Input
"It might be possible that our approach could perhaps yield some improvement."
Output
4 hedges in 12 words (33%) — confidence 0/100.
"Might", "possible", "could", "perhaps", "some" — every claim is hedged. A confident rewrite: "Our approach yields a measurable improvement."
Hedging language — "may", "suggests", "appears to", "in some cases" — is scored against a domain setting, because there is no universal correct amount. Academic writing is expected to hedge: a claim stated without qualification implies a certainty the evidence rarely supports, and reviewers notice. Marketing copy hedged the same way sounds evasive.
Legal writing hedges for a third reason again — to bound liability rather than to reflect uncertainty — and its hedges are load-bearing in a way that editing must not disturb.
The failure this tool is best at catching is stacked hedging, where several qualifiers modify one claim: "it may possibly suggest that in some cases there could be". Each hedge alone is defensible; together they leave a sentence asserting nothing while appearing to assert something.
The opposite failure is real too. A summary that strips every hedge from hedged source material has changed the meaning, and that is a more serious error than clumsy prose. When you cut hedges, check that the underlying claim still matches its evidence.
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