Writing Analysis & Editing Tools
Checkers for the habits editors mark most often in academic and professional writing — passive voice, wordy phrases, filler words, hedging, informal language, comma splices, repeated words and commonly confused pairs — plus tools for spelling variants, poetry and comparing drafts. Each one highlights what it finds, explains why, and leaves the decision to you.
Writing Analysis & Editing
44 tools · free, no sign-up
Grammar Checker
Catch repeated words, a/an errors, punctuation slips, its/it's and then/than mix-ups, and 40+ common misspellings. Rule-based, free, and your text never leaves your browser.
Paraphrase Quality Checker
Compare your paraphrase to the original text. Check if your rewrite is different enough to avoid plagiarism.
Text Diff Checker
Compare two texts side by side and highlight the differences. Find changes between drafts, revisions, and versions of your writing.
Passive Voice Detector
Detect passive voice constructions in your writing. Highlight passive sentences and get suggestions to rewrite them in active voice for stronger academic prose.
Transition Word Finder
Find and analyze transition words in your text. See which transitions you use, identify gaps, and get suggestions for smoother flow between paragraphs and ideas.
Oxford Comma Checker
Check your text for consistent Oxford comma usage. Detect serial commas, find inconsistencies, and ensure your writing follows APA, Chicago, or AP style rules.
Cliché Finder
Find clichés and overused phrases in your writing. Highlight tired expressions like 'at the end of the day' and get fresher alternatives.
Filler Word Finder
Find filler words like 'very', 'really', 'just', and 'basically' that weaken your writing. Highlight them and tighten your prose.
Adverb Finder
Find -ly adverbs in your writing and see where stronger verbs could replace them. Highlight every adverb with density statistics.
Wordiness Checker
Find wordy phrases like 'due to the fact that' and get concise replacements ('because'). Cut your word count without losing meaning.
Capitalization Checker
Check your text for capitalization errors — sentence starts, the pronoun I, days, months, and common proper nouns — and fix them in one click.
Headline Analyzer
Score your headline on length, word balance, emotional and power words, and clarity — with concrete suggestions to improve click-through.
Commonly Confused Words Checker
Highlight commonly confused words in your text — their/there/they're, affect/effect, its/it's, then/than — with the rule for each so you can verify your usage.
Contraction Expander
Expand contractions for formal academic writing — don't becomes do not, it's becomes it is — with ambiguous cases flagged for review.
First-Person Checker
Find first- and second-person pronouns (I, we, my, you) in your academic writing — highlight them and see where more objective phrasing may be expected.
Nominalization Finder
Highlight nominalizations (zombie nouns) such as implementation and analysis, and verb-weakening phrases like make a decision, with the verb to use instead.
Hedging Language Checker
Find hedges (may, suggest, possibly) and boosters (clearly, prove, always) in academic writing, with rates per 1,000 words and the hedge-to-booster balance.
Academic Vocabulary Checker
Highlight the words in your text that are on the New Academic Word List (NAWL) and see your academic vocabulary coverage, word by word.
Word Repetition Checker
Find words you repeat too close together — argue, argues, argued — within a window you set or the same sentence, with each echo highlighted and measured.
Sentence Opener Checker
See how every sentence opens, spot runs of sentences that start with the same word and heavy use of The, This, It, There and I, and vary your openings.
Inclusive Language Checker
Check writing against APA's bias-free language guidance — gendered terms, age, disability and identity labels — with alternatives and the reason for each.
Formal Writing Checker
Find informal words and phrasal verbs in academic writing — a lot of, kids, find out, come up with — with formal alternatives for each.
Quotation Percentage Checker
Find every quotation in an essay, see what share of its words are quoted, and spot quotations long enough to need APA or MLA block formatting.
Text Summarizer
Shorten an article or chapter to its most central sentences with TextRank or word-frequency scoring, see its top keywords, and find each chosen sentence in the source.
Abbreviation & Acronym Checker
Check every abbreviation in a paper against APA's guidance — defined at first use, used consistently, used often enough — and build a sorted List of Abbreviations.
Concordance Tool (KWIC)
Search a text for a word or phrase and see every occurrence lined up in keyword-in-context view, with wildcard search, sorting, collocates, and a CSV export.
British to American Spelling Converter
Convert British spelling to American or back — colour and color, organise and organize, centre and center — with Oxford spelling and every change highlighted.
Comma Splice Checker
Highlight commas that join two complete clauses, with the reason for each flag and a period, semicolon or conjunction fix. A rule-based heuristic, not a grammar parser.
To Be Verb Checker
Highlight am, is, are, was, were, be, been and being by use (linking, passive, progressive, there is, dummy it), with density per sentence and stronger-verb prompts.
Vague Pronoun Finder
Find sentences that open with a bare This or That, broad-reference which, and paragraph-opening it, each with the reason it is unclear and nouns to try instead.
Latin Abbreviation Checker
Check e.g., i.e., etc., cf., viz., vs. and et al. for punctuation, redundancy and APA 7's parentheses-only rule, with the English to use in running text.
Number Style Checker
Check numerals versus words under APA 7 or Chicago 18: sentence-opening numbers, percent and units, ordinals and fractions, with the rule and the replacement for each flag.
Dialogue Punctuation Checker
Check fiction dialogue for commas versus periods with tags, capitals after tags, action beats and where punctuation sits inside quotation marks, with the fix for each.
Sticky Sentence Checker
Find sticky sentences: see the percentage of glue words (the, of, is, that) in every sentence, highlight the glue-heavy ones, and get a glue index for the whole text.
Anthropomorphism Checker
Find studies, papers, theories and tables that think, argue or conclude — APA 7 anthropomorphism — with rewrites that name the researchers or use a literal verb.
Spell Checker
Check spelling online with ranked suggestions, an ignore list and a US or UK spelling option. The word list loads once; your text is never uploaded.
Complex Word Finder
Find long words (3+ syllables) and plain-language list words such as utilize and prior to, with the simpler alternatives the Federal Plain Language Guidelines suggest.
Unmatched Brackets and Quotes Checker
Find unmatched parentheses, brackets, braces and quotation marks in your text, with the line and column of each one and the text around it.
Hyphen and Dash Checker
Check hyphens, en dashes and em dashes against APA 7 and Chicago 18: number ranges, -ly adverbs, compound modifiers and spaced dashes, with one-click fixes.
Haiku Checker
Check a haiku against 5-7-5 or your own pattern: syllables for every line and word from dictionary pronunciations, ambiguous words you can flip, and a seasonal-word note.
Poem Meter Analyzer
Scan a poem from dictionary stress: the dominant foot and line length, a stress mark for every syllable, substitutions named, and a fit score with confidence for each line.
Rhyme Scheme Analyzer
Letter a poem's rhyme scheme (ABAB, AABBA…) from how its line endings sound, telling perfect rhymes from slant rhymes, naming the form and flagging eye rhymes.
Alliteration Finder
Find alliteration by sound, not letter, plus assonance and consonance runs, highlighted in your text with each repeated sound named and listed line by line.
Simile Finder
Find similes built with like and as … as in a poem or passage, with 'I like tea' and 'as soon as' filtered out and listed, each match rated likely or possible.
An Editing Pass, in Order
Edit from the largest problems to the smallest, so you do not polish a sentence you later delete. Structure and argument come first and need your own reading; the checkers take over from there.
Sources, Drafts and Creative Writing
- Sources and quotations. The Paraphrase Quality Checker compares a paraphrase with its original, the Quotation Percentage Checker shows how much of an essay is quoted, and the Latin Abbreviation Checker catches misused e.g., i.e. and et al.
- Comparing and reading. The Text Diff Checker for two drafts, the Text Summarizer to test whether the main point shows, the Concordance Tool to see every use of a word in context, and the Abbreviation & Acronym Checker for terms used before they are defined.
- Spelling variants and headlines. The British to American Spelling Converter for submissions to a US journal, and the Headline Analyzer for titles and subject lines.
- Fiction and poetry. The Dialogue Punctuation Checker, Haiku Checker, Poem Meter Analyzer, Rhyme Scheme Analyzer, Alliteration Finder and Simile Finder.
What Rule-Based Checkers Can and Cannot Do
These tools match patterns: word lists, phrase lists and grammatical cues such as a form of be followed by a past participle. That makes them fast, predictable and private — the text you paste is analyzed in your browser and not sent anywhere — but they do not understand meaning. Expect some false alarms ("She was tired" is not passive) and some misses. Every flag is a question for you, not a correction to accept.
None of these tools detects plagiarism or AI-written text, and no tool does that reliably. The paraphrase checker measures how much wording a paraphrase shares with its original — useful for revising your own paraphrase, which still needs a citation. The guide to avoiding plagiarism explains what does. For clearer sentences in general, see the guides on academic writing clarity and active vs. passive voice, and for length and reading level the Counters & Readability shelf.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Is passive voice wrong in academic writing?
- No. APA 7 prefers the active voice but accepts the passive when the actor is unknown or unimportant, and lab reports often use it in the method section. Use the passive deliberately, not by default — the Passive Voice Detector shows where you have.
- Can I use "I" in an academic essay?
- Often, yes. APA 7 allows the first person to describe what you did, and many humanities instructors accept it. Some assignments and disciplines still ask for an impersonal voice, so check the brief; the First-Person Checker finds every I, we and you if you need to remove them.
- How do I make my essay shorter without losing content?
- Start with wordy phrases ("due to the fact that" → "because"), filler words and nominalizations ("make a decision" → "decide"). The Wordiness Checker and Filler Word Finder find them; trimming them typically saves words without cutting a single idea.
- What is a comma splice, and how do I fix it?
- A comma splice joins two complete sentences with only a comma: "The test was short, it was hard." Fix it with a period, a semicolon, or a comma plus a coordinating conjunction ("The test was short, but it was hard."). The Comma Splice Checker flags likely cases for you to judge.
- Do these checkers replace a full grammar tool or a human editor?
- No. These are focused, rule-based checks that explain each flag, with no account and no upload. They catch common patterns well and miss what needs an understanding of meaning, which is where a writing center, a tutor or a careful reread still matters.
- Is my text stored or sent anywhere?
- No. The checkers run in your browser; the text you paste is not uploaded to CitationEasy or anyone else.