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Passive voice & clarity checker

Detect passive voice, long sentences, filler words, and vague language that weakens your writing. This clarity checker scores all four and shows per-sentence fixes: free, instant, no signup.

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Students

Improve essays before submission. Catch passive voice your professor will mark down.

Researchers

Academic writing often overuses passive. This tool flags every instance.

Content Writers

Tighten blog posts and articles. Remove filler that bores readers.

Professionals

Make reports and emails clearer. Strong writing signals competence.

Writing Clarity Checker: Find Passive Voice, Filler Words, and Weak Sentences

Clear writing converts. Passive voice, overly long sentences, filler phrases, and vague placeholder language are the four most common patterns that make content feel evasive and unconvincing. This clarity checker analyzes every sentence and scores on the rate of each pattern, not on raw counts, so document length never changes the verdict. A paragraph that is 100% passive sentences takes the full 35-point passive deduction. Sentences over 30 words are flagged as long, and hedge words like "potentially", "ultimately", "possibly", and "generally" are counted as filler: because they usually are.

For SEO writers, this clarity checker directly surfaces E-E-A-T signals: Google's quality raters specifically look for writing that is "accurate and clear" as part of trustworthiness assessment. For students, passive voice is the most commonly penalized pattern in academic essay writing. This clarity checker provides per-sentence annotations rather than a single global verdict, so you can prioritize the highest-impact edits first.

Content teams run this clarity checker before publishing long-form articles to keep filler word density low. Editors use it to review submitted drafts without manually scanning for passive voice. Non-native English writers use it to flag indirect constructions before peer review. Pair it with the passive voice remover to auto-rewrite every flagged sentence, and the word counter to track length against a target.

How to Find Vague Language in Your Writing

Vague language is the clarity problem every other checker misses. Passive voice detection, filler word counts and readability formulas all pass this sentence: "The team made several improvements to address some issues." It is active, short, and contains one flagged filler word. It is also unfalsifiable — there is nothing in it a reader could check, disagree with, or act on.

This clarity checker measures vague language by counting placeholder phrases against concrete detail. Placeholder phrases are abstract nouns with no referent ("issues", "initiatives", "outcomes", "areas"), empty verbs ("address", "leverage", "drive", "deliver"), vague quantifiers ("several", "various", "multiple") and unbounded time or scope ("going forward", "across the organization", "at scale"). Concrete detail is anything a reader can hold on to: figures, percentages, dates, proper nouns, acronyms and units.

The two counts work together rather than separately. Concrete detail discounts the vague language penalty, because technical and analytical writing legitimately uses abstract nouns when it also commits to specifics. It never cancels the penalty outright, because prose stuffed with placeholders is still hard to act on however many figures surround it. Writing with neither — a recipe, a set of instructions, a short story — is not penalised at all, since having no numbers is not the same as hiding behind their absence.

The fix is mechanical. Take each flagged phrase and ask what it stands for. "Several improvements" becomes the three things you actually changed. "Going forward" becomes a date. "Address the issues" becomes the specific fix. If a phrase turns out to stand for nothing at all, cut the sentence: it was not carrying information. The same discipline is what the E-E-A-T checker rewards under first-hand experience, and what the Google penalty risk scanner looks for when it flags thin, templated content.

How the Clarity Score Is Calculated

The clarity score starts at 100 and applies five deductions. Every one is a rate rather than a raw count, so a 2,000-word article is held to the same standard as a 200-word one and simply writing less never improves the score.

  • Passive voice — up to 35 points. 0.35 points per percent of sentences that are passive, so an entirely passive paragraph takes the full deduction.
  • Long sentences — up to 20 points. 0.20 points per percent of sentences over 30 words.
  • Filler and hedge words — up to 25 points. Charged only once filler exceeds 2% of total word count, so ordinary prose is not punished for the occasional "really".
  • Vague language — up to 30 points. Placeholder density measured against concrete detail, as described above.
  • Sentence density — up to 10 points. 4 points at an average above 20 words, 7 above 25, 10 above 30.

Passive voice and vague language are scored separately because they are different failures. Passive voice hides who acted; vague language hides what happened. A sentence can fail both at once, and the worst business writing usually does — which is why the results panel breaks the score down by category instead of handing you a single number. For the passive half of that problem, the passive voice remover rewrites flagged sentences directly, and when passive voice is actually the right choice covers the cases where the deduction is worth taking.

"Most clarity problems in business writing come down to three habits: hiding the actor in passive constructions, softening every claim with a hedge word, and burying the point in a 40-word sentence. Fix those three and your writing becomes noticeably stronger, even if nothing else changes."

Frequently Asked Questions

Passive voice reverses subject and object: "The report was written by the team" instead of "The team wrote the report." It makes writing feel indirect and weaker. Most style guides recommend active voice for clarity and engagement.
Filler phrases add length without meaning: "very", "really", "potentially", "ultimately", "in order to", "due to the fact that". Cutting them typically makes sentences 15-25% shorter with no loss of meaning.
It counts placeholder language against concrete detail. Placeholder language means abstract nouns with no referent ("issues", "initiatives", "outcomes"), empty verbs ("address", "leverage", "drive"), vague quantifiers ("several", "various") and unbounded time and scope ("going forward", "across the organization"). Concrete detail means figures, dates, names, acronyms and units. Text dense in the first and empty of the second loses up to 30 points. Concrete detail discounts the penalty but never erases it, so plain instructional writing with no numbers in it is never penalised for having none.
Above 75 is strong and publishable. 55-75 is typical of business blog content: readable but revisable. Below 55 means the writing has serious clarity problems, such as dense passive voice, heavy hedging, vague placeholder language, or overlong sentences that obscure the point. Below 30 indicates text that reads as corporate boilerplate or bureaucratic evasion.
Start at 100, then take off five rate-based deductions. Passive sentences cost up to 35 points, at 0.35 points per percent of sentences that are passive. Sentences over 30 words cost up to 20 points, at 0.20 points per percent. Filler and hedge words cost up to 25 points once they exceed 2% of total word count. Vague language costs up to 30 points, based on placeholder density measured against concrete detail. An average sentence length above 20 words costs 4 points, above 25 costs 7, and above 30 costs 10. Every deduction is a rate rather than a raw count, so a 2,000-word article is judged by the same standard as a 200-word one.
No. Clarity analysis runs entirely in your browser: nothing is transmitted to a server at any point.

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