Free Formality Checker
Score your draft against academic register in seconds. The checker highlights the four habits that make writing read conversational: informal words and phrasal verbs, contractions, direct address and exclamation marks, and offers a click-to-fix academic alternative for each. Built for essays, research papers, theses and professional reports that need to sound as considered as they are.
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How to check formality in three steps
Paste your text
An essay, a manuscript section, a cover letter or a report. There is no word limit.
Read the score
A 0-100 formality score with a verdict band, plus counts of informal words, contractions, direct address and exclamation marks.
Click to fix
Underlined items swap to their academic alternative on click: a lot of becomes many, figure out becomes determine. Undo if you disagree.
Why this formality checker is different
Four signals, one view
Informal vocabulary, contractions, direct address and exclamation marks are flagged together, so one pass covers the habits that matter most for register.
Click-to-fix suggestions
Each flagged item carries a plain academic equivalent where one exists, applied with a click and reversible with undo. Phrasal verbs are matched by inflection: figured out becomes determined.
A score you can act on
Marker density per hundred words, mapped to bands calibrated for academic prose. Watch the score climb as you work through the highlights.
Current conventions, not myths
First person is not flagged: APA and major journals accept "we" and "I". The checker targets what actually reads as informal in 2026, not folklore rules.
Register: the fastest signal in academic writing
Every reader of academic work carries a register detector they cannot turn off. A supervisor marking essays, a reviewer skimming a manuscript, a committee reading a grant application: all of them notice "a lot of" where the literature says "many", and "we couldn't figure out why" where a paper would say "the mechanism remains unclear". The judgement happens in milliseconds and colours everything that follows. Register is not a decoration on top of the content; it is part of how the content is weighed.
Formal register in English is built from a few consistent choices. Single precise verbs replace phrasal ones: examine rather than look into, determine rather than figure out, omit rather than leave out. Contractions are written out. The reader is never addressed as "you"; claims carry measured quantifiers rather than intensifiers; and the exclamation mark does not appear. Each choice removes a marker of speech from prose that will be read, quoted and judged in print. This is also where AI-assisted drafts need attention: chatbots switch register with the prompt, so a manuscript revised across several sessions often mixes formal and conversational phrasing in the same paragraph.
The opposite failure is just as real. Writers warned about informality sometimes swap every plain word for a longer one, and the result is the stilted prose style guides call inflated: "utilize" for "use", "commence" for "begin". Genuine academic register is plain, precise and unhurried, not ornate. The checker's suggestions are chosen on that principle: the alternative to "figure out" is "determine", not "elucidate".
Formality is one dimension of a draft that reads well. For sentence rhythm, try the burstiness checker; for AI-flavoured vocabulary, the AI word cleaner; and for the craft behind all of it, our guide on improving your academic writing style.
Informal to academic: the swaps that come up most
A working reference drawn from the checker's lexicon. Each is a plain equivalent, not a decorated one.
Phrasal verbs
Speech joins a small verb to a particle; academic prose prefers the single precise verb.
Vague quantities and nouns
Casual measures read as guesses; formal equivalents carry the same meaning with more precision.
Casual connectors
Sentence-openers borrowed from conversation, each with an established academic counterpart.
Habits to remove
Not swaps but subtractions: features of speech that formal prose simply drops.
Who uses the formality checker
Students
Lift essays and assignments to the register markers expect, and learn the academic equivalent of each conversational habit as you fix it.
ESL and non-native writers
Register is the hardest part of a second language. See exactly which words read as casual and what a native academic writer would use instead.
Researchers and PhD students
Sweep manuscripts and thesis chapters before supervisors or reviewers read them, especially sections drafted quickly or with AI assistance.
Professionals
Formalize proposals, reports and cover letters where a chatty first draft needs to carry institutional weight.
Formality checker FAQs
What does the checker flag?
How is the formality score calculated?
Is "we" or "I" informal?
Is my text uploaded to a server?
Register is one dimension. Polish all of them.
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