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someone could write a simple grammar checker that looks for words in that list, passive voices, sentence length and whatnot and suggests alternatives. It wouldn't work without human oversight but then again, no automated checker really does.

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http://www.hemingwayapp.com/

Thanks for reminding me about this! I had seen it years ago, but forgot about it till now.

Although, as ever on these topics, it's probably worth finding out what professionals think of these tools (spoiler: not much although this is from 2014 and it's possible they've improved it since.)

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10416 "Filed by Mark Liberman under Prescriptivist poppycock"

edit: Just checked and it still rates "Silly" x 75 as "Good". "Hemingway" x 30 rates as "Post-graduate" but otherwise good. Yeah, it's still broken.

I use https://languagetool.org/ for that. I have integrated this Java program in Vim as well. Every time I think I finished a piece of write, I run the ":LanguageToolCheck" command to learn that my writing still leaves a lot to be desired.

Is the Java tool directly connecting to the site for the checks or it uses some kind of local database? Is it updatable?

I use it as a local Java program and you can enable / disable all kinds of rules. You can also write your own.

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