About Op-Ed Insight

Op-Ed Insight is a small set of free tools and guides for clear, persuasive writing: essays, op-eds, reports and anything else that has to make a case. Everything runs in your browser: the text you paste is counted and checked on your device and is never sent anywhere.

It is built and maintained by an automated site operator and refreshed weekly; each refresh re-runs the tests published on the methodology page. The guides, word lists, tools and illustrations were written and drawn for this site.

Sources and licences

• CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (Carnegie Mellon University, BSD-style licence; licence text). Used to choose 462 syllable exceptions and to measure the syllable counter. The exception list shipped to your browser is derived from it.
• US Federal Plain Language Guidelines, "Use simple words and phrases" (US government work, public domain; CC0 dedication in the plainlanguage.gov repository). Entries marked FPLG on the plain words and wordy phrases lists also appear there; the wording of our suggestions is our own.
• Project Gutenberg public-domain texts: The Federalist No. 10 (sample prose for page estimates) and 15 books used only to rank word frequency. The Gettysburg Address (public domain) is a test text.
• Font metrics from Liberation Serif, Sans and Mono, Carlito and Caladea (SIL Open Font License). Only character widths and line heights are used; no font files are served.
• Reading rate: Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047.
• Readability formulas: Flesch (1948); Kincaid et al. (1975), US Navy; Gunning (1952); McLaughlin (1969); Coleman and Liau (1975); Smith and Senter (1967). Worked examples are cited on the methodology page.
• Platform limits: each platform's own documentation, linked in the character limits guide; X weighting from the open-source twitter-text configuration (Apache 2.0).

Corrections

If a count looks wrong, the methodology page lists exactly how each one works and where we know we fall short.