Guides
Guides
13 hands-on how-tos for common writing and text tasks. Each one is practical rather than theoretical, and links to the tools that do the work.
About these guides
These guides are for writers, editors, students, and anyone who works with text and wants to get a specific job done well: hitting a word or character limit, making copy readable, cleaning up a messy paste, comparing two drafts before publishing, or tidying a list. Each one explains how the underlying task actually works — what counts as a word, how a readability score is calculated, why a URL slug should never change once it is live — before pointing you at the tool that handles it.
Read a guide end to end, or jump straight to the tool callouts inside it. Everything the guides describe happens in your browser, so you can follow along with your own text without it being uploaded anywhere.
- 6 min read
Essay & assignment word counts: what actually counts
How essay word counts work — what counts towards the limit, how to hit a target without padding, and how many words fit on a page.
- 7 min read
Cleaning text pasted from Word, Docs & PDFs
How to clean text pasted from Word, Google Docs, and PDFs — fixing smart quotes, hidden characters, and broken line wraps.
- 6 min read
Writing readable web copy: Flesch basics
How to write readable web copy — the Flesch reading-ease score explained, sentence length, and practical rules for clearer online writing.
- 5 min read
Making good URL slugs for your posts
How to make good URL slugs for blog posts — length, keywords, stop words, and the formatting rules that keep links clean and stable.
- 8 min read
Regex basics for writers and editors
A practical regex guide for writers and editors — find-and-replace patterns for tidying text, with worked examples and no programming.
- 6 min read
Character limits that matter: social & SEO
The character limits worth respecting — X posts, meta descriptions, and page titles — plus why graphemes, emoji, and pixel width complicate the count.
- 7 min read
Reading the Flesch score: students vs web copy
Flesch–Kincaid means different things for an essay and a web page. How to read the grade level for each audience and what target actually fits.
- 6 min read
Comparing drafts before you publish
How to diff two versions of a document to catch unintended edits, review tracked changes, and choose between line and word comparison.
- 6 min read
Cleaning up messy lists: dedupe, sort, tidy
How to clean a messy list of emails, SKUs, or tags — order-preserving dedupe, natural sorting, and removing blank lines without breaking data.
- 6 min read
Running focused writing sessions with timers & goals
How to structure a writing session with a focus timer, a word goal, and a daily streak — and how to keep the goals honest rather than a source of guilt.
- 6 min read
Case styles for code and titles
camelCase, snake_case, kebab-case, and CONSTANT_CASE versus title and sentence case — what each convention is for and when to reach for it.
- 6 min read
Keyword frequency without keyword stuffing
How to read word and phrase frequency to check a draft covers its topic — using stop words, natural repetition, and writing that never reads as stuffed.
- 6 min read
Reading time vs speaking time for scripts
Why a script takes longer to say than to read, the words-per-minute figures that matter, and how to pace a talk to fit a fixed time slot.