The plain style is simple, direct, unambiguous, and unadorned. No word is accidental or merely descriptive. The plain style is appropriate whenever you want to convey information without evoking emotion or creating an impression of the writer's character. The plain style is defeated by wordiness, redundancy, clichés, and nominalizations (using a noun phrase when an adjective or verb phrase would be more effective).
At the bottom of this screen is a simplistic (unreliable) program. It compares what you have written to a list of several thousand of the thousands of possible imperfect expressions and prints any case-sensitive matches back to the screen, color coded according to the particular imperfection. It will not catch everything; It will "catch" problems that aren't actually problems, and it knows no grammar. The goal is to help you think about how you are writing and not to “fix” what you have written.
Perhaps the best use of this tool is to inspect the dictionaries linked below and make your own lists of such expressions to avoid.
Copy and past text into the space below and hit the submit button. The style checker prints the content back to the screen below the box, color coded. Edit and resubmit. When it comes back with nothing highlighted, what you have should be more effective than what you had.
orange -- nominal You've used a noun phrase instead of an adjective or verb. Rephrase the main idea using a verb or adjective: in all likelihood likely. list of nominal expressions
green -- wordy You've used unnecessary words: at this time currently. list of verbosities
darkred -- redundant You've said the same thing twice. Delete the adjective: common similarities. list redundancies
blue -- cliché You've used an overly common metaphor, simile, or allusion. Find another way to say the same thing: sour grapes bitter. list of clichés
red -- prepositional phrase; You've begun a sentence with a prepositional phrase; begin with a noun instead: To the library I am going I'm going to the library. list of prepositional phrases
purple -- vague word You've used a word that is too general. Specify. Some people say . . . Jocasta said in her last interview . . . list of vague words
yellow -- business jargon You've used an overused business cliché. Be more direct. We need to downsize in order to right size this departmet You are fired because we need to make more money. list of bizz words