Informing and entertaining readers, or simply wanting to understand your own notes when you read them later, are just two of the many reasons for a clear and concise writing style. Writing better articles on Wikipedia shows specific examples of different writing styles and pleads for conciseness and comprehensibility.

Measurable text features such as sentence length, keyword density or the number of foreign and filler words enable automated evaluation and phrasing assistance.


book cover by Wilhelm Fucks

Quantitative Style Analysis not only for Forensics and Art History

The quantitative stylistic analysis also enables forensic and historical insights. Wilhelm Fucks, a German physics professor, explained theory and practice of quantitative style analysis in his 1968 book “Nach allen Regeln der Kunst” (By every trick in the book). There is a contemporary ZEIT book review available online.

German Online Text Analysis Tools

The (German) Wortliga Text Analyse (Word League text analysis) offers stylistic tips (not only for German lessons) to avoid so called expressive errors (Ausdrucksfehler).

Philognosie is another German tool to fight against filler words and non-words like “actual” or “quite a little bit” that used to be popular with students and marketing agencies.

Voyant-Tools analyze You analyse the text corpus, vocabulary density, number of words and the most frequent words in a text.

Linguistic Style Check in the AI Era

I have checked and amended the link list below in March 2025:

  • Stilcheck by Liane Hein (German)
  • BlaBlaMeter: How much bullshit is in a text? (German)
  • ZeroGPT checks for signs of AI-generated texts like done by ChatGPT.
  • DeepL can translate German and English texts and offer improvement suggestions.
  • grammarly supports when writing in English.

The following tools are no longer available in their original form (2024). I have therefore removed the links. The metrics mentioned are still potentially relevant.

Textalyser, WebQuests, Vanished Links and Tools

A text or website analysis at Textalyser provided extensive analyses, including the number of different words and the lexical density and readability (Gunning-Fog Index) of the texts, the number of characters, syllables and sentences, as well as the average word length measured in syllables per word. Also the average sentence length in words, the longest and shortest sentence, the most frequent words and the most frequent two-, three-, four- and five-word phrases. You can also enter the link to a website or blog in the text analyser. Source with links to further text tools: textanalyseonline by WebQuests (no longer available).