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The words you stopped seeing

You chose every word in your draft deliberately, which is exactly why you cannot see the ones that are doing nothing. Clichés, filler, and long phrases with short equivalents — marked where they sit.

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Paste something above. Clichés, filler words and phrases with shorter equivalents get marked where they sit.

What gets marked, and why

Wordy — the useful ones

Phrases with a shorter equivalent that means the same thing. Due to the fact that is because. Has the ability to is can. In order to is almost always just to. These are the easiest cuts in editing because there is no judgement involved — the replacement is listed beside each one.

Cliché — phrases a reader slides past

At the end of the day, low-hanging fruit, moving the needle. Not wrong, and not even unclear — the problem is that they have been read so many times that the eye skips them. Whatever you meant lands as nothing.

Filler — intensifiers that reduce intensity

Very, really, quite, actually. The odd thing about these is that they weaken what they are attached to — “very important” reads as less important than “important”, because the reach for emphasis signals that the word alone was not going to carry it.

Some of these flags are wrong

Literally is occasionally literal. Just is sometimes precisely the word — “just before midnight” is not filler. A cliché in dialogue is characterisation rather than laziness, because people speak in clichés and writing them out of a character makes the character sound like nobody.

So nothing is removed, nothing is scored, and there is no percentage to improve. It marks things for you to look at. A tool that presented this list as rules would teach people to delete words they meant, which is a worse outcome than the filler.

And the word you did not notice repeating

Anything used three times or more gets listed. Some of it is unavoidable — a report about valves will say valve a great deal, and replacing it with synonyms would be worse than the repetition.

What you are looking for is the accidental one. The adjective that turned up four times in two pages, the verb you reached for whenever the sentence got difficult. Those are invisible while writing and obvious in a list.

For frequency across a whole document rather than the words worth cutting, the word cloud shows the shape of it. If the problem is length rather than phrasing, cutting word count covers the structural edits that recover far more than filler ever will.

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