The jargon density calculation (above) lets you know how readable your piece of text is. Does it contain lots of acronyms? Is it clear? You don’t want to guess. Most writers think they’re way closer than they are. They’re so close to what they wrote they can’t see the mess anymore, they forget that readers […]

Reading is hard when your sentences run on. That’s what happens when a writer connects more than one idea in a single breath. A lot of writers does that. They use conjunctions and commas to link point A to point B to point C. By then, the sentence has run completely off the rails. This […]

Even when your draft is punctuated correctly, you may still sense that something isn’t right about it. Often that’s a sentence fragment, a partial thought that goes unnoticed because it sounds like natural pause. Writers of fiction use sentence fragments to interrupt lengthy text. They can be used for emphasis. That’s less of an issue […]

If you went to high school, do you remember grammar drills? You had to identify if each sentence was simple, compound, or complex. Your teacher circle it with a red pen. It always felt like busywork. It felt like you were learning something that didn’t apply to real writing because the structure seemed too rigid. […]