Blog
Guides to the math behind the tools — readability formulas, pricing your work, sizing a build, and planning a game world.
Punnett squares for fictional bloodlines: a genetics primer for writers
How to use real Mendelian genetics to plan inherited traits in fantasy families and fan fiction, what a Punnett square actually tells you, and where the model breaks down on purpose.
Pricing laser-cut items for Etsy: what a Glowforge or xTool job really costs
The real cost stack behind a laser-cut item — sheet material, run time, machine wear, and labor — and how to turn it into a wholesale and retail price that actually makes money.
Clause depth, not word count: how a sentence complexity analyzer reads your syntax
Readability formulas count syllables and sentence length. A sentence complexity analyzer goes one level deeper — into clauses, subordination, and passive structure. Here is exactly what it measures and how to use it to untangle dense prose.
How to measure the formality of your writing (and hit the register you are aiming for)
Tone is hard to judge in your own writing. A formality analyzer turns the casual-to-formal axis into a 0–100 score by counting the signals readers react to: slang, contractions, pronouns, passive voice, and Latin-root vocabulary. Here is how it works and how to use it.
Measuring vocabulary sophistication: rare words, CEFR levels, and when "advanced" hurts you
A vocabulary sophistication analyzer estimates how demanding your word choices are — average word length, advanced-word percentage, and a CEFR level estimate. Here is how it decides what counts as advanced, and how to read the result without dumbing your writing down.
Hedge words: when "might", "perhaps", and "appears to" undercut your writing
Hedge words signal uncertainty and drain authority from your prose. What they are, when they belong, and how to find the ones that are quietly weakening every paragraph.
When every sentence starts with "The": fixing monotonous openings
Repetitive sentence openings make prose drone even when each sentence is fine on its own. How to spot the pattern, why it happens, and how to measure your opening variety.
How long should a paragraph be? Counting sentences for rhythm
Paragraph length controls the pace and breathability of your writing. How to count sentences per paragraph, spot the wall-of-text outliers, and edit for rhythm.
EFLAW: the readability score built for non-native English readers
Most readability formulas count syllables and assume a native reader. McAlpine’s EFLAW takes a different angle — it counts the short words that trip up ESL audiences. Here is how the score works, why it correlates with real comprehension, and how to use it.
Word frequency analysis: seeing what your text actually overuses
A word frequency count is the simplest text-analysis tool there is, and one of the most revealing. Here is how stopword filtering changes the picture, why the percentages matter more than the counts, and what to do with the table once you have it.
Lexical diversity: what TTR measures, and why you need MATTR
Type-token ratio is the classic measure of how varied your vocabulary is — and it has one notorious flaw that makes it almost useless for comparing texts of different lengths. Here is how TTR works, why it sinks as text grows, and how MATTR fixes it.
Why your meta tags get cut off: pixels, not characters
Google truncates titles and descriptions by pixel width, not character count — which is why two snippets of the same length can be cut differently. Here are the real limits, why the rules of thumb mislead, and how to write tags that survive.
Sentence length variety: the rhythm metric that makes prose readable
Average sentence length only tells half the story. The standard deviation — how much your sentences vary in length — is what separates flat, monotonous writing from prose with rhythm. Here is how to measure and use it.
Echoes: how to catch the words you accidentally repeat
The same word reused a few sentences apart is one of the most common and invisible writing flaws. Here is why your brain skips over these echoes, how a proximity finder catches them, and how to fix them without a thesaurus binge.
Very, really, just, basically: how to find and cut filler words
The weak words that quietly bloat your writing — intensifiers, hedges, discourse markers, and qualifiers. What each category does, why it weakens prose, and how to find your worst offenders fast.
Lexical density: the simple ratio that measures how packed your writing is
Lexical density is the share of content words versus function words in your text. What it really measures, the typical ranges for speech and academic prose, and why a high score is not always a good thing.
Why your 280-character tweet is actually too long: weighted counting explained
Twitter does not count characters the way you think. Links always cost 23, emoji and CJK count double, and the 280 limit is really a weighted budget. How it works and how to split a long post into a clean thread.
How syllable counting works (and why it quietly drives your readability scores)
The vowel-group heuristic behind automated syllable counting, the silent-e and -le rules that trip it up, why it lands around 95% accurate, and how syllables feed Flesch, SMOG, and Gunning Fog.
The -ly trap: how to find and fix adverb overload
Why -ly adverbs weaken prose, how an automated detector separates real adverbs from false positives, what adverb rate to target, and a practical editing workflow.
N-grams for writers and SEOs: finding the phrases you repeat
What bigrams and trigrams are, how an n-gram analyzer counts and filters them, why stopword handling and lowercasing matter, and how to use phrase frequency for self-editing and keyword research.