How to Use This Tool
Paste your writing. Every flag comes with a specific replacement, because “make it more formal” is not something you can act on at 3 a.m. the night before an exam.
The advice this tool refuses to give
Search for essay formality advice and you will be told to remove every I. That rule comes from research papers, where the convention is real. It does not transfer to exam writing.
An IELTS Task 2 prompt ends with a question like “To what extent do you agree?” or “What is your opinion?”. The band descriptors for Task Response reward presenting a clear position throughout. A candidate who has been told to strip out every first-person pronoun ends up writing “it could be argued that” four times and never states what they think — which is the exact failure the descriptor is looking for.
So this tool does not flag I think, in my opinion, or I disagree. If you are writing a dissertation rather than an exam essay, that convention does apply, and you should ignore this paragraph.
What it does flag
- Phrasal verbs with a single-word equivalent. find out, look into, cut back on, get rid of. These are matched as phrases, so look on its own is left alone. Lexical Resource rewards precise vocabulary, and a two-word verb where one exists is the easiest place to lose that mark.
- Intensifiers and vague quantity. very, really, a lot of, super, way. Usually a sign that the adjective is doing too little work: very big means substantial, and one word beats two.
- Unhedged absolutes. everyone, always, it is obvious that. Academic register hedges claims it cannot support. This is about accuracy, not politeness.
- Contractions and filler nouns. don’t, stuff, things, etc. The last one is worth a moment: etc. almost always means the writer wanted a third example and did not have one. An examiner reads it that way too.
How to read the count
The number that matters is flags per 100 words, not the raw total, because a longer essay will always flag more. Under about 2 per 100 is unremarkable. Above roughly 5 per 100 the register is noticeably conversational and it will be visible to a marker.
These thresholds are a rule of thumb from the density of the flagged categories, not a published standard. No exam board grades register by counting words, and any tool that gives you a “formality score out of 100” has invented that number.
