Hemingway

Hemingway is a text box with an opinion about your sentences. Paste a draft and it returns a reading grade plus a colour map: sentences it judges hard come back yellow or red, adverbs blue, passive constructions green, and words it thinks you could simplify are marked too. The newer desktop build also advertises grammar checking and tone adjustment, but the grade and the colouring are still the product, and they are honest about what they measure — effort, not correctness. Its real strength is immediacy. No queue, and no model quietly rewriting your voice: a paragraph that comes back mostly yellow teaches you something a rewrite suggestion never will.

Against Grammarly or ProWritingAid it loses on coverage. It will not reliably catch a comma splice, cannot see that a paragraph buries its point, and has no idea what the document is for; the long diagnostic reports those tools produce are exactly what this one refuses to write. Choose it anyway if your problem is length and passivity rather than accuracy, because it makes both visible in one glance. Check before paying: the web version is free and paste-in, paste-out, while the desktop Editor is a separate one-time purchase rather than a subscription — no renewal, but also no collaboration and no cloud library. If you write inside Google Docs or on a phone keyboard, confirm this is a surface you can actually reach; historically it has been a web page and a desktop app, not an editor you live in.