AcademicStyle

Tone checker: how formal does your writing sound?

Paste a paragraph to get a formality score, with every contraction, colloquialism, intensifier and direct address marked in the text, and an AI rewrite into academic register when you want one.

Marked up

Basically, social media has a huge impact on how kids figure out who they are. You can't really ignore it anymore! A lot of studies show that teens who spend tons of time online feel worse about themselves, but it's pretty much impossible to say what causes what. Researchers need to look into this stuff more carefully.

Select a highlight to see why it was flagged.

Rewrite formally

Rewrites the passage in academic register, keeps your claims and citations, and lists what changed.

What makes writing sound academic

Register is not about long words. Linguists who study academic English, notably Douglas Biber’s corpus work at Northern Arizona University, find that academic prose differs from conversation in a handful of measurable ways: it packs information into noun phrases, uses precise single-word verbs instead of phrasal verbs (“investigate” rather than “look into”), avoids contractions and addressing the reader, and hedges its claims (“suggests”, “may”) instead of stating certainty.

Step through the ladder to watch one claim climb from a text message to a journal sentence. Each rung changes one or two features, not the whole vocabulary.

Kids who are on their phones a ton do way worse in school, obviously.

Slang (“a ton”, “way”), “kids”, an intensifier and an opinion marker. Reads like a text message.

score 41

Questions

How is the formality score calculated?

It starts from a neutral 75 and moves up or down with measurable features: contractions, informal words and phrasal verbs, intensifiers, direct address (“you”), exclamation marks and rhetorical questions pull it down; longer average word length and hedging verbs push it up. Each factor’s effect is shown so you can see exactly why you got the score.

Is first person (“I”, “we”) informal?

Not necessarily. APA 7 encourages “I” and “we” to describe what the authors did, and many humanities journals accept it. The checker highlights first person as a note, not an error, so you can decide based on your guide.

What does the AI rewrite change?

It rewrites the passage in a formal academic register: it removes contractions, slang and intensifiers, replaces phrasal verbs with precise ones, and keeps your meaning and citations exactly. It lists the main changes after the rewrite.

Can writing be too formal?

Yes. Stacked nominalisations and long Latinate words make prose hard to read. Pair this with the readability checker: a formality score above 85 with a Flesch score below 20 usually means the text needs simplifying, not more polish.