Run a checker over a page of competent second-language English and it finds almost nothing. The page still reads as though it came through a machine, and the reason is measurable rather than mysterious. The sentences are all roughly the same length and all of them are long, and the sentences inside a paragraph do not pick each other up. Neither of those is an error, so nothing reports them, and both are what a reader is reacting to when they say it reads like a translation.
So the first two edits are mechanical and they cost nothing. Find your longest sentence and break it in two. Then look at the first four words of each sentence in a paragraph and check that at least one of them appeared in the sentence before.
The six this cluster hangs on
- one idea per paragraph, and a new idea starts a new paragraph even when the old one is two lines long.
- the topic sentence goes first in English expository writing. Readers expect the claim before the evidence, which is the reverse of several other written traditions.
- cut every word that earns nothing. In order to is to; due to the fact that is because.
- vary the sentence length. Four sentences of the same length in a row read as a list whatever they say.
- the semicolon joins two full sentences that could each stand alone, and nothing else.
- British and American spelling differ systematically, in groups rather than word by word, so the differences can be learned as four rules.
English connects by repeating, not by announcing
A paragraph in English holds together because each sentence starts from something the previous one left behind. The old information goes at the front, the new information goes at the end, and the next sentence picks up that end and moves it to its own front. Nothing announces this. It is done with a repeated noun, a pronoun, or a word that obviously belongs to the same idea, and it is the whole of what one idea, an opening line, and how the next one connects is about.
Most learners were taught the opposite technique, because most school writing traditions reward explicit signposting. So the connection gets announced with a heavy adverb at the head of the sentence, moreover and furthermore and in addition, and an English reader hears those as scaffolding round a building that is not there. The test is quick: delete every one of them and see whether the paragraph falls apart. If it does, the sentences were never connected and the adverbs were doing the joining on their own.
Sentence length is the same fault at a smaller scale. A long sentence in English is not more formal, it is a promise that the reader will hold several things at once until the verb arrives to tell them what to do with them. One long sentence in a paragraph of short ones is emphasis. Six in a row is a bill the reader stops paying, and that is what length, rhythm, and where a sentence breaks is for.
The day the squiggles stop is the day the writing stops
Here is where writers in a second language plateau, and it is not a level. It is the moment the checker goes quiet. Up to that point there has been a signal: a red line, a correction, a returned essay with marks on it, and every one of them pointed at something specific. Past it there is nothing. No tool marks a paragraph with no thread, no tool marks the email that was one degree too formal, and no colleague writes back to say your report was accurate and exhausting.
What makes it worse is that the absence of signal reads as success. The writer concludes that the writing is finished, when what has actually finished is the class of problem that a machine can name. Everything that decides whether the thing gets read is in the other class, and it stays invisible until somebody is unusually honest with you or you learn to hear it yourself.
The way out is to get a second signal that is not about errors. Send the same email to somebody who will tell you whether they would have answered it. Read a paragraph you wrote a month ago beside a paragraph from a writer you admire and count the sentences in each. Neither of those is comfortable and both give you information the checker cannot.
What gets reported
What a checker marks, and what a reader actually reacts to
Every item below the line decides whether the text is read to the end, and not one of them produces a red line under anything.
- SpellingMarked, and the cheapest thing on the page to fix
- Agreement and tenseMarked, and worth a band in an exam script
- A comma in the wrong placeMarked, and almost never what the reader noticed
- A paragraph with no threadEvery sentence true, none of them holding the next
- Six long sentences in a rowNothing wrong, and nothing carrying any emphasis
- The register missed by one stepToo formal reads as cold, too warm reads as presumptuous
- An opening that describes the emailThe reader has decided before it finishes
- The reader stopped at paragraph twoThe only measurement that mattered, and nobody reports it
The waterline is a claim about what gets reported rather than a measured proportion. What it does say honestly is that the tools all sit on one side of it, and so does all the feedback most writers ever get.
Two ways to hear a draft instead of reading it
The first costs nothing and is the one most people have never tried: have the text read aloud to you. The voice is in your phone, your browser and your word processor, and in 2026 the voices are good enough that the sentence that never ends is unmistakable. It replaced reading your own draft silently, which does not work on your own writing, because the eye supplies the rhythm and the emphasis that the page itself is missing. Free, already installed, and the only edit tool here that finds the fault the checker was never looking for.
The second is Hemingway Editor, still free in the browser in 2026, which colours long sentences and counts the ones a reader has to work at. It replaced counting the words in your own sentences by hand, which nobody has ever done twice. Use it with the limitation in mind, and it is a real one: it has a single house style, short and plain and American, and it will flag things that are correct in thesis, argument and evidence, in the shape examiners expect and mark you down for them. Take its sentence lengths. Ignore its opinion about your vocabulary.
The mistake: writing it in your own language first
Drafting in the language you think in and then converting is the habit that produces the most damage, and it is not the vocabulary that suffers. It is the register. Politeness is built differently in every language, and the polite version of a request does not survive the crossing: a perfectly normal opening in one language arrives in English as either brusque or as pleading, and the writer has no way to tell which, because judging politeness in a second language is the last thing to arrive and the first thing people assume they have.
An English request is short, states the thing, and leaves the softening to a couple of fixed formulas rather than to an accumulation of warmth. That is most of the content of openings, closings and the register each situation asks for, and it is why a collection of ten emails you received and would have been glad to answer is worth more than any guide, including this one. Write in English from the first word, badly if necessary, and fix it afterwards.
Which of the six is actually costing you
If the writing is correct and unread, the fault is in the paragraph and the sentence, and no amount of work below that level will move it. If it is being marked rather than read, go to the mechanics, where commas, semicolons and apostrophes, settled is an afternoon that closes the whole subject and the patterns behind the exceptions, and the words everyone misses is a list rather than a skill: the same forty words account for most of what gets marked, and they can simply be memorised.
What none of this addresses is where the sentences you are imitating come from, since a writer who does not read English does not have any. Nobody writes a sentence shape they have never met, so the supply for everything above is getting through more of it without losing the meaning, and a writer whose English arrives only through a course will write like the course. The rules underneath the sentence, when you want to know why a break is legal, are the rules that decide what a sentence is allowed to mean. And if the writing that matters is a report somebody senior will skim in ninety seconds, the standard changes again and that is the English that decides whether you get the role.