Editorial style & consistency checker

1. Paste your copy into the box — an article, a brief, a newsletter, a standfirst.
2. Switch rule packs on or off so the check matches your desk. All five are on by default.
3. Press Check. Every flag is highlighted in the text and listed underneath.
4. Click a flag to jump to it, read the suggestion, and make the call yourself — the tool never edits your text.

Word count, sentence count, average sentence length and an estimated reading time (based on 220 words per minute) update with every check.

• Commonly confused words — affect/effect, its/it's, your/you're, who's/whose, practice/practise, fewer/less, comprise/compose, principle/principal and other pairs that survive a spellcheck because both spellings are real words.
• Consistency — the same term hyphenated one way in paragraph two and another way in paragraph six, or capitalised inconsistently mid-sentence.
• Numbers & dates — numerals under 10 in running text, plus date and time formats that are mixed within a single piece.
• Clichés — “in the wake of”, “sparked outrage”, “perfect storm” and the rest of the newsroom furniture, each with a plainer alternative.
• Clarity — sentences over about 34 words, passive constructions that hide who did what, and adverb pile-ups.

House style is not pedantry: it is the signal that a title is edited. Readers rarely notice consistency, but they always notice its absence — and for a subscription publisher, the quality of the reading experience is the product. This checker is a helper for a first pass, not a replacement for a human sub, and every flag is a question rather than a correction.

All the rules are bundled with the page and run locally in JavaScript. There is no upload, no API call, no logging, no analytics on your text and no storage — press Check with your network tab open and you will see no requests. Close the tab and the text is gone. That means you can safely run embargoed, legalled or pre-publication copy through it.