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Short, practical guides on readability, sentence structure, and plain writing.
- The Flesch Reading Ease Score, Explained
How the Flesch Reading Ease formula works, term by term, what the score ranges mean, and what it can't tell you about your writing.
- Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, Explained
How the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level formula relates to Flesch Reading Ease, what a grade target actually means, and when it makes sense to aim for one.
- The Gunning Fog Index, Explained
How the Gunning Fog Index defines a 'complex word,' where that definition breaks down, and how it compares to the other two scores.
- How Readability Formulas Fail
Readability scores can be gamed by short, choppy nonsense. See a real demo, what formulas can't see, and why we pair scores with detail.
- How to Tell If an Edit Improved Your Writing
A lower readability score after an edit isn't proof the edit worked. What to actually check, and why an overall improvement score would be dishonest.
- Why Long Sentences Are Hard to Read
The working-memory case against long sentences, with a nested example unwound step by step and a real before/after rewrite.
- Passive Voice: What It Actually Is
What passive voice actually is grammatically, common myths, how to spot it reliably, the three legitimate uses, and rewrite patterns.
- Nominalizations: The Zombie Nouns
What nominalizations are, why they add words and hide who's doing what, plus a 20-pair conversion table and the suffix pattern to watch for.
- Adverbs: Which Ones to Cut and Which to Keep
How to spot weak manner adverbs, the classic tell that means cut it, and the two cases where an -ly adverb is doing real work.
- Hedging Language and Weasel Words
What hedges and intensifiers are, why they let writing avoid a checkable claim, and when qualifying a statement is actually the honest choice.
- Keyword Density Is Not a Ranking Factor
Why the classic keyword-percentage advice stopped working decades ago, and how to use a frequency table without chasing a number.
- Word Repetition and Rhythm
Why a word repeated three times in two sentences stands out to readers, and how to tell a real repetition problem from a necessary one.
- Throat-Clearing Openers
Why sentences start with dead weight like 'it is important to note that,' how to spot the pattern, and why deleting it never loses information.
- There Is, There Are
When 'there is' or 'it is ... that' is the right call, when it buries your sentence's real subject, and how to tell the difference.
- What Grade Level Should I Write At?
Recommended reading-grade targets by document type, why 'write at 8th grade' is misread advice, and how to lower grade level without dumbing down.
- How Long Should a Sentence Be?
Why there's no magic word-count target for a sentence, where length actually starts to hurt readers, and what to aim for instead.
- Reading Speed and Reading Time
Where the words-per-minute figure behind every reading-time estimate actually comes from, and why the old 200 wpm figure is outdated.
- Expanding Acronyms on First Use
Why 'expand it on first use' is the most repeated rule in every style guide, and the four ways real documents actually break it.
- Writing a Glossary for Technical Docs
Why technical teams need a glossary, why almost none of them have a current one, and how to draft one straight from a document instead of a blank page.
- Terminology Consistency in Documentation
Why the same word spelled two different ways is one of the hardest defects to catch by eye, and how it differs from a plain style preference.
- US vs. UK Spelling in Technical Writing
Neither American nor British spelling is wrong. Mixing both in the same document is — and it happens more often than most writers realize.
- Inclusive Language in Technical Writing
Where terms like allowlist, denylist, and primary/replica actually came from, who adopted them, and how to tell a genuine industry shift from a fad.
- Writing Without Gendered Defaults
Why 'chairman,' 'he/she,' and 'guys' persist in writing long after their replacements became standard, and how to catch them without overcorrecting.
- Homoglyph Attacks in Text
How a lookalike letter borrowed from another alphabet can pass a visual review and still fool a computer doing an exact comparison.
- Heading Hierarchy in Documentation
Why skipping a heading level breaks more than it looks like it does, and what a generated table of contents actually depends on.
- Writing for Non-Native English Readers
Why most software documentation is read by people who didn't learn English first, and what that actually changes about how to write it.
- Title Case vs. Sentence Case
When to use each, and why AP, Chicago, MLA, and APA style guides genuinely disagree about which words a title should capitalize.
- Naming Conventions in Code
How camelCase, snake_case, PascalCase, and the rest are used across languages, and how to convert between them without breaking things.
- Cleaning Up Text Pasted From PDFs
Why text copied out of a PDF comes out with broken line wraps mid-sentence, and how to rejoin it into real paragraphs without losing paragraph breaks.
- How Long Should a Meta Description Be?
Why the '155 characters' rule of thumb is actually a pixel-width limit wearing a character-count costume, and what that means for how you write one.
- Why Google Rewrites Your Title Tag
Length is only one reason Google replaces the title you wrote with one of its own — the other reasons have nothing to do with truncation at all.
- Markdown Tables That Don't Break
The handful of ways a Markdown table quietly falls apart — pipes in code spans, ragged rows, CJK alignment — and how to avoid each one.