Throat-Clearing Score
One number for how often your sentences clear their throat before making a point — and which opener you lean on hardest.
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- Opener density
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- Sentences affected
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- Distinct openers
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Every opener you used
Cleaned text
Every opener above is removed and the next word capitalized in its place. A throat-clearing opener is never replaced with a shorter phrase — it's deleted outright, which is why this edit is safe to apply without rereading each sentence.
Your text, annotated
Needs attention Worth a look — select a highlight for details.
Findings
How the score is calculated
The score runs from 0 to 100, where lower is better. A 0 means no sentence in your text opens with a stall phrase. It's built from two measurements, not a count of findings.
Density — the share of sentences that stall
A raw count of openers grows with document length, which makes it useless for comparing two pieces of writing: four openers in a 40-sentence report is a stray habit, four in an 8-sentence email is a tic. Density is the share of your sentences that open with a stall phrase, so a long document isn't punished for being long.
Repetition — the opener you lean on
Density alone can't tell apart four different openers from the same opener used four times, but a reader can. Four different ones read as leftover first-draft habits. The same one four times is a crutch, and it's the case that actually teaches a reader to skim past the first few words of every sentence, because experience has taught them nothing important lives there.
So the score applies a surcharge based on how much a single opener dominates the openers present — up to 1.5x when they're all identical, and exactly 0 when every one is distinct. The surcharge is capped on purpose: it can sharpen a score, but it can't manufacture a problem in text that barely throat-clears. Writing that stalls on 4% of its sentences stays a low score no matter how identical those few openers are.
What it deliberately doesn't count
Only sentence-initial phrases count. "Needless to say" buried mid-sentence might be connecting two clauses, and a rule that fired anywhere would start guessing at grammar it can't parse. Phrases that survive the deletion test are also excluded: "According to the vendor's documentation" looks like throat-clearing but tells a reader where a fact came from, so cutting it loses information. That's a citation, not dead weight.
Reading your score
- 0 — Clean
- No sentence opens with a stall phrase.
- Under 5 — Trace
- One or two openers in an otherwise direct piece of writing.
- 5 to 15 — Light
- A few first-draft running starts survived, but they read as stray habits.
- 15 to 30 — Noticeable
- A reader will feel the pattern, even if no single sentence looks wrong on its own.
- 30 and up — Heavy
- Enough sentences stall that a reader learns to skim past the start of every one.