Writing Style Report (Manuscript Analysis)

About the Writing Style Report (Manuscript Analysis)

Open or paste a whole manuscript — a novel, a thesis, a long report — and get eighteen style reports for it at once, chapter by chapter: overused words, echoes, repeated phrases, sticky sentences, clichés, redundancies, adverbs, weak verbs, passive voice, wordy phrases, hedges, typos, long sentences, repeated sentence starts, sentence rhythm, dialogue tags, pacing and your own house-style rules. Every flag says why it was raised and what to try instead, and the chapter view highlights the flags in your text.

The report reads Word (DOCX), OpenDocument (ODT), EPUB, PDF, Markdown, RTF and plain text, keeps your headings as chapters, and scores each chapter with the Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level formulas. The checks are rules and word lists, not AI, and they run on your device: an unpublished manuscript is never uploaded.

Common uses

• Self-editing a novel before it goes to beta readers, an editor or an agent.
• Checking a thesis or dissertation chapter by chapter for long sentences, passive voice and wordy phrases.
• Handing a writing group or a client an annotated Word copy to work through in Word’s comments.
• Keeping a publication’s house style — its spellings and banned words — across a long document.

What each report looks for

• Overused words: about forty words writers lean on — qualifiers (just, really, very), filter words (felt, saw, noticed), stock gestures (nodded, shrugged, smiled) and vague nouns (thing, something) — counted per 1,000 words against a limit.
• Echoes: the same word (or the same stem: walked, walking) again within 30 words in the same chapter. Names and the plain tags “said” and “asked” are left out.
• Repeated phrases: word-for-word phrases of three to eight words that come back three times or more (twice in texts under 5,000 words); a phrase inside a longer repeated one is not listed again.
• Sticky sentences: sentences of ten words or more in which glue words — the, of, to, it, was, that and some 240 others — make up 70% or more.
• Clichés and redundancies: about 400 stock phrases (“left no stone unturned”) and more than 250 phrases that say the same thing twice (“added bonus”, “return back”). A verb with a particle (“fell down”) is flagged only when nothing follows it (“fell down the stairs” is fine).
• Adverbs: words ending in -ly, apart from adjectives and nouns such as friendly, early, family and names.
• Weak verbs: hidden verbs (“made an attempt” → “tried”), a weak verb propped up by an adverb (“walked slowly” → “strolled”) and sentences that open with “There was” or “There are”.
• Passive voice, wordy phrases, hedges and vague claims and typos (the same word twice, “a” or “an” before the wrong sound) use the rules of the Passive Voice & Writing Style Checker.
• Long sentences (over 30 words, or the limit you choose), repeated sentence starts (three or more in a row) and sentence rhythm (five or more sentences in a row within three words of each other in length).
• Dialogue tags (fiction): a full stop before a tag, a capital after the comma (“…,” She said), adverbs in tags and actions used as tags (“she smiled”); the table lists every tag verb you use.
• Pacing (fiction): the share of dialogue in each chapter and paragraphs of 150 words or more with no dialogue.
• House style: the words and phrases you list, with the form you want instead.

How the numbers are worked out

Words and sentences are found with the Unicode text rules, the same way as in the Readability Checker, and English syllables with the open-source syllable library. Headings and scene breaks (* * *) count as words of the manuscript but are left out of every sentence-level report.

• Flesch Reading Ease = 206.835 − 1.015 × (words ÷ sentences) − 84.6 × (syllables ÷ words); 0–100, higher is easier, from Rudolf Flesch’s “A new readability yardstick”.
• Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level = 0.39 × (words ÷ sentences) + 11.8 × (syllables ÷ words) − 15.59, a US school grade, from Kincaid, Fishburne, Rogers and Chissom’s report for the US Navy.
• Rates are per 1,000 words of prose; reading time uses 260 words a minute for fiction and 238 for non-fiction, the silent-reading averages of Brysbaert’s review of reading-rate studies.
• Overused-word limits are MySmartCoPilot’s own rules of thumb, not a published standard: a word is flagged when it is used at least three times and more often than its limit. Relaxed raises every limit by half, Strict lowers them by 40%.

Chapters, sections and files

Chapters start at the headings of your file (Word’s heading styles, the headings of an e-book’s chapter files, an ODT outline) and at Markdown headings: the shallowest heading level that is used at least twice. Without headings, lines such as “Chapter 12”, “CHAPTER TWELVE: The Storm”, “Part Two”, “Prologue” or “Epilogue” start chapters, and so do bare numbers (“12”, “XII”) when they are far enough apart not to be page numbers. A text with none of these is split into sections of about 2,500 words. Choose Headings only or No chapters under Settings to change this.

Footnotes and endnotes are left out, and so are the headers and footers of Word, OpenDocument and RTF files. Text from a PDF comes from its text layer, with line-end hyphens joined: numbers on their own line there are page numbers and never start chapters, but a running head printed on every page is read as text, so open the original document when you have it.

Limitations

• English only: the word lists and rules are written for English, and the report says so when a text looks like another language.
• Rules cannot read meaning. A flagged phrase can be exactly right where it is — a cliché in a character’s mouth, a deliberate repetition, a passive that hides an unknown doer — so treat every flag as a question, not a correction.
• Passive voice and adverbs are found from spelling patterns, so a few adjectives that look like past participles or adverbs are flagged, and some irregular forms are missed.
• Dialogue is found from quotation marks (“…” or ‘…’). Dialogue set with dashes or without marks is not recognised, and the fiction-only reports then stay quiet.
• A scanned PDF has no text layer to read: run it through PDF OCR first. Old Word files (.doc) must be saved as .docx.
• The annotated Word copy has a comment on each of the first 3,000 flags; the rest are shaded only. It rebuilds the text with its headings, so keep your original file for the formatting.

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