The patterns that make prose heavy
A handful of recurring constructions account for most of what makes writing feel laboured. Nominalisation — turning a verb into a noun — is the largest: "we made a decision regarding the implementation" carries two buried verbs and reads as bureaucratic, where "we decided to implement" says the same thing in half the words.
Passive voice is less universally bad than style guides suggest. It is the right choice when the actor is unknown, irrelevant or deliberately de-emphasised, which is why it is standard in scientific writing. It becomes a problem when it conceals responsibility — "mistakes were made" — or when it is used by default, which distances the reader from every sentence.
Then there are the filler constructions: "there is" and "it is" openings that delay the subject, hedges stacked on hedges, and phrases like "in order to", "due to the fact that" and "at this point in time" that expand a single word into several. Cutting these is almost always an improvement.
Rhythm, and what not to smooth away
Uniformly short sentences are not good writing; they are a different failure from uniformly long ones. Prose reads well when sentence length varies — a series of measured sentences followed by a short one lands with force precisely because of the contrast. Editing every sentence to the same length flattens that entirely.
The same applies to vocabulary. Simplifying is right when a long word adds nothing, and wrong when it is more precise. "Use" is not always better than "utilise", but it usually is; "approximately" and "about" genuinely differ in register, and the choice depends on the piece.
Voice is the thing most easily lost. Automated smoothing tends toward a competent, neutral register that reads as no one in particular, and for anything where the writer's presence matters — an essay, a newsletter, an argument — that is a real cost. Suggestions are worth evaluating individually rather than accepting wholesale.
Editing in passes
The most effective habit is separating drafting from editing. Trying to write and refine simultaneously slows both, because the two use different kinds of attention. Draft badly and quickly, then edit.
Editing in distinct passes works better than one pass attempting everything: first structure — is the argument in the right order, is anything missing or redundant — then paragraph and sentence level, then word level, then a proofread for typography and mechanics. Each pass has one question, which is easier than holding four.
Reading aloud remains the single most effective technique available, because the ear catches what the eye skips: repeated words, missing connectives, sentences that run out of breath, and rhythm that stumbles. Distance helps too — a piece left overnight reads very differently. For length targets, the word counter is more useful than an estimate.