Why's it called Confetti?
Paste a tidy-looking page into Confetti and it immediately throws a small paper parade over it.
Eight colours. One for very hard sentences. One for hard sentences. More for passive voice, adverbs, plain language, Style Manual rules, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 issues and the rules you add yourself.
Your calm little document is suddenly wearing every highlighter in the drawer.
Good.
The name describes the screen, not the promise.
Eight colours, zero mysterious scores
A score tells you that something is wrong. Confetti points at the sentence making trouble.
One sentence can collect 4 colours at once. At that point it stops looking like a sentence and starts looking like it dressed for Mardi Gras. Very festive. Also, probably worth a look.
You might find a verb trapped inside a noun. An actor missing from a passive sentence. A 38-word sentence trying to carry the work of 3. Confetti does not turn all of that into 73 out of 100 and wish you luck. It leaves the pieces on the page where you can see them.
That is the honest picture of a first draft, and most tools hide it behind a single number.
Editing is controlled demolition
This is the part of the name I like.
Editing gets described as polishing, as if the draft is already a lovely table and your job is to make it shine. Often, the table has 3 legs and one of them is an abstract noun.
So you pull the sentence apart. You rescue the verb. You put the actor back in. You move the useful bit from the end to the start. Then you read it aloud and discover you have somehow made it worse.
Excellent. Now you are editing.
For a while, the sentence sits in pieces on the table – like confetti.
You cannot rebuild a sentence you are not willing to take apart.
It gets messier. That is progress.
A page nobody has checked can look wonderfully peaceful. So can a junk drawer with the lid closed.
Run the check and the colour arrives. The page looks busier because the problems have names now. That is not the tool ruining your draft. It is the tool switching the light on.
The mess is not damage. It is the work becoming visible.
Some flags will earn a rewrite. Some will earn a firm "no, that wording stays". Both are useful decisions. The point is not obedience. The point is noticing.
Please do not try to win Confetti
Clear an issue and its colour disappears. Keep going and the page becomes words again.
Satisfying? Yes. A game? No.
You can get to zero by sanding every sentence flat. You can remove the technical word your reader needs, split an idea that belongs together or cut the warmth out of a line because a formula looked sternly at it.
A spotless page can still be unhelpful, inaccurate or dull.
Confetti shows you where to look. It does not tell you what to do.
The colour has to do more than look pretty
There is one serious condition attached to all this colour.
If colour carries the meaning on its own, anyone who cannot separate those colours loses the tool. That fails WCAG 2.2 and, more importantly, fails the person trying to use it.
Switch on accessible view and every highlight also gets a letter and its own underline pattern. V for very hard. P for passive. S for Style Manual. The colours can stay at the party. They just cannot host it alone.
A name that leans on colour has to earn it.
So, why Confetti?
Because that is what a first draft looks like once every problem has introduced itself.
A bit loud. A bit chaotic. Full of pieces you can move, cut, join and rebuild.
Then the editing works. The colour clears. The words remain.
And when you get there, when the page is clean and readable, it does feel like throwing confetti in the air. You should celebrate. Making something genuinely easy to read is harder than most people think.
And unlike real confetti, you do not have to vacuum it out of the carpet for the next 6 months.
Photo created with help from AI
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I write these to be used, not just read. Tell me if this wouldn't work in your organisation, and why.