Free Online Hemingway Style Checker

1. Paste your draft into the text box.
2. Check the estimated reading grade at the top — aim for grade 9 or lower for a general audience.
3. Look at the five counts: hard sentences, very-hard sentences, adverbs, passive voice and wordy phrases.
4. Edit the red and yellow sentences first: split them, cut adverbs and swap wordy phrases for simpler ones.

The Hemingway Editor, launched in 2013, popularised a colour-coded approach to readability: long, dense sentences are flagged yellow or red, adverbs and passive constructions are marked, and complex phrases that have simpler equivalents are called out, all anchored to a target reading grade. The idea borrows Ernest Hemingway's famously spare style — short sentences, strong verbs, few qualifiers.

This tool is an independent, rule-based reimplementation of that approach. It splits your text into sentences and grades each by length and the density of polysyllabic words, mirroring the app's 'hard' and 'very hard' bands. It counts adverbs (most -ly words), detects passive voice using a 'to be' plus past-participle heuristic, and matches a built-in list of wordy phrases such as 'due to the fact that' (better: 'because'). The overall grade uses the Automated Readability Index, which estimates US school grade from characters, words and sentences.

Readability scores are guides, not verdicts. Plain-language guidance — including the US federal Plain Writing Act of 2010 — recommends writing for a general audience at roughly grade 8 or below, but legal, medical and technical writing legitimately runs higher. Use the highlights to find sentences worth tightening, then trust your ear. All processing happens locally in your browser.