Text Simplifier

About the Text Simplifier

Dense writing is rarely dense because the idea is hard. It is dense because of habits: the actor buried behind a passive construction, verbs turned into abstract nouns, three clauses stacked into one sentence, and a specialist word standing where an ordinary one would do. Undo those four things and most policy, legal and academic prose becomes readable without losing a single thing it was saying.

That is what this page does to the text you paste. It breaks long sentences apart, puts the actor in front of the action, turns abstract nouns back into the verbs they were made from, and cuts words doing no work. What comes back is shorter, but that is a side effect rather than the aim.

The reading level is a setting with four positions, and the fourth is the one most tools omit. Writing for someone reading English as a second language is a different job from writing for a child: the vocabulary needs to be common rather than short, the voice active, and the idioms and phrasal verbs gone, because "put up with" is opaque in a way that "tolerate" is not, however plain it feels to a native speaker.

There is a switch, on by default, that keeps every number, date, name, condition and exception exactly where it is. It matters more than it sounds. To simplify is not to summarise, and a rewrite that drops a condition because the condition made the sentence awkward has changed what the document means. That is a real risk with any policy or contract clause, which is exactly the material people bring here.

The rewrite is also told, in as many words, not to sound as though it is addressing a child unless you asked for that. Plain is not the same as patronising. One produces a document people will read; the other produces one they resent.

How to use it

1. 1Paste the dense passage — a policy, a clause, an abstract, a page of documentation.
2. 2Choose the reading level. Use the second-language setting when your readers are fluent but not native.
3. 3Keep every number and name locked unless you genuinely want detail dropped.
4. 4Run the readability checker on the result to see the change as a number rather than an impression.
5. 5Turn on the glossary when readers will still meet the specialist terms elsewhere and need to recognise them.

Questions

Is this the same as summarising?

No, and conflating them is how meaning gets lost. Simplifying keeps everything the passage said and changes how it says it — the result is often nearly as long as the original. Summarising is permitted to leave things out. If the document is a rule that someone has to follow, you want this page and not that one.

Can I use it on a contract or a policy?

For your own understanding, yes, and it is good at exactly that. Do not replace the original with the rewrite. A simplified version of a binding document is a reading aid, not the document, and the conditions in the real one are what will apply.

How do I know it worked?

Measure it. The readability page on this site takes both versions and gives you six scores computed on your own machine, so you can see the grade level drop rather than take an impression on trust. Two or three grade levels is a typical improvement on genuinely dense prose.

Why is the result sometimes longer than what I put in?

Because unpacking is expansion. A single sentence with three subordinate clauses becomes three sentences, and a nominalisation such as “the implementation of the procedure” becomes a clause with someone doing something in it. Fewer words per sentence is what makes it easier to read, not fewer words overall.