Methods and systems for scoring written text based on use of idiomatic expressions, including reading pre-selected idiomatic expressions in a canonical form into memory, expanding idiomatic expressions from the canonical form, reading a written response into the memory, pre-processing the written response, searching the pre-processed written response for idiomatic expressions, and assigning a score to the written response. The score may be based at least in part on the number of idiomatic expressions in the written response. Corresponding apparatuses, systems, and methods are also disclosed.