Readability Score

How to use Readability Checker

1. 1
   Paste your writing. A paragraph, a page or a whole article.
2. 2
   Read the three scores. They measure the same thing on different scales and should broadly agree.
3. 3
   Look at the flagged sentences. Shortening the worst few usually moves every score.

About checking readability

Readability formulas all work from the same two observations: longer sentences are harder to follow, and longer words are harder to read. Flesch Reading Ease combines words per sentence and syllables per word into a 0-to-100 scale where higher is easier, and Flesch-Kincaid rearranges the same inputs to produce a school grade level instead. Gunning Fog takes a different angle on vocabulary, counting the proportion of words with three or more syllables while excluding those that only reach three through a common ending such as -ing or -ed. What none of them measure is meaning. A passage of grammatical nonsense in short words scores beautifully, and a clear explanation of a genuinely difficult subject scores badly because the necessary vocabulary is long. This is why the scores are editing signals rather than targets: an article rewritten to hit a number often reads worse than the draft that scored lower, because the writer chopped sentences rather than clarified ideas. The most useful output is not the score but the list of longest sentences. Sentence length is the largest single input to every formula, and the distribution matters more than the average — a piece averaging eighteen words per sentence with a few forty-word monsters reads far worse than one that is consistently eighteen. Fixing the worst three or four typically moves every score and genuinely improves the writing, which is the rare case where the metric and the goal point the same way.

Frequently asked questions