Most content problems that reach the public were visible 10 minutes before publishing. Nobody looked. Looking meant re-reading the whole page with fresh eyes, and fresh eyes are the one thing you don't have by the final draft.
This is the routine we use at Content Co before anything goes live. It takes about 10 minutes with a checker. It works because it looks at the page in a fixed order: big structural problems first, mechanical ones last.
Minute 1–2: get the numbers
Paste your draft into Confetti (or drop the Word file straight in). Before you touch anything, look at 3 numbers.
Reading grade: aim for about year 7.
Passive sentences: under 5%.
Long sentences over 25 words: under 5%.
These tell you whether you're editing or rebuilding. A page at grade 9 needs trimming. A page at grade 14 needs its sentences taken apart.
Two cautions on the grade. Flesch-Kincaid reports a US school grade. The year 7 target is the Australian Government Style Manual's, so treat the two as roughly aligned rather than identical. And the target is a compass, not a finish line. You can hit grade 5 by cutting nuance the reader needed. The plain language standard says as much. What counts is whether readers can find, understand and use the page, 'rather than on mechanical measures such as readability formulas'.
One honest limit. If the numbers say rebuild, this is not a 10-minute job. A page at grade 14 with a quarter of its sentences over 25 words needs an hour and a blank document, not a checker. Close the tool, write the page again, then run the 10 minutes on the new draft.
Minute 3–5: fix the hardest sentences
Work through the 'very hard' sentences first, because they're doing most of the damage to both the score and the reader. The fix is nearly always the same: find the second idea hiding in the sentence and give it its own full stop. Don't polish word choice yet; sentence surgery first.
Here's one from a concession page. Before: 'If your circumstances change after you have lodged your application, you must notify us within 14 days or your concession may be cancelled.' After: 'Tell us within 14 days if your circumstances change after you apply. If you don't, we may cancel your concession.' One sentence became 2, 23 words became 20, and the actor came back: we cancel it.
Minute 6–7: verbs
Now the passive voice and hidden verb flags. Ask of each passive: does the reader need to know who does this? If yes, put the actor back. For hidden verbs like 'make an application' and 'undertake a review', use the verb the noun is sitting on: apply, review.
Minute 8–9: mechanics
Let the Australian Government Style Manual and accessibility flags do their work. Double quotes become singles. Spelled-out numbers become numerals. Dates go in the right order, headings drop the Title Case, acronyms expand on first use, 'click here' links get a real name. None of these need judgement. That's why a deterministic checker should catch them, not you.
Except when the checker is wrong. The accessibility flag in this section fires on 'click here'. This page trips it on purpose, because naming the bad example is the only way to teach it. So dismiss it. A rule that needs no judgement still needs someone to notice the one page where the rule doesn't apply. That is what the last minute is for.
Minute 10: decide, don't obey
A checker flags; it doesn't rule. Some flags will be wrong for your page: a term of art, a deliberate repetition, a passive that's doing its job. Dismiss them and move on.
Dismissing isn't deleting. A dismissed flag greys out rather than disappearing, so the decision stays in the record for you or a reviewer to find later. That's the difference between a page you've checked and a page you've thought about. The goal isn't a clean scoresheet. It's a page you've decided about, line by line, with evidence.
The first few times, this takes 20 minutes. By the fifth page it takes 8 minutes. And your drafts start needing less of it, because the checker has been quietly teaching you your own habits.
Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash.