About the Readability Checker
Paste your writing to get its Flesch Reading Ease score and grade level from five readability formulas, plus sentence length, complex words and other statistics.
Key features
- Flesch Reading Ease score with plain-English rating
- Five grade-level formulas and their average
- Words per sentence, syllables per word and complex words
- Flags long sentences (25+ words)
- Instant results as you edit
- Private: your writing stays in your browser
How easy is your writing to read?
Clear writing gets read, understood and acted on. Paste a draft to see its Flesch Reading Ease score and grade level, then shorten sentences and simplify words until the score reaches your target.
Flesch Reading Ease scale
| Score | Difficulty | Typical reader |
|---|---|---|
| 90–100 | Very easy | 5th grade (age 11) |
| 80–89 | Easy | 6th grade |
| 70–79 | Fairly easy | 7th grade |
| 60–69 | Plain English | 8th–9th grade |
| 50–59 | Fairly difficult | 10th–12th grade |
| 30–49 | Difficult | College |
| 0–29 | Very difficult | College graduate |
The formulas
| Formula | Based on |
|---|---|
| Flesch Reading Ease | 206.835 − 1.015 × words/sentence − 84.6 × syllables/word |
| Flesch-Kincaid Grade | 0.39 × words/sentence + 11.8 × syllables/word − 15.59 |
| Gunning Fog | 0.4 × (words/sentence + 100 × complex words/words) |
| SMOG | 1.043 × √(complex words × 30 / sentences) + 3.1291 |
| Coleman-Liau | Letters and sentences per 100 words |
| Automated Readability (ARI) | Characters per word and words per sentence |
Syllables are estimated with a dictionary-free rule set, so counts can be off by one for unusual words. That's fine for comparing drafts.
How to improve your score
- Shorten sentences. Aim for an average of 15–20 words; split anything over 25.
- Choose short words. "Use" instead of "utilize", "help" instead of "facilitate".
- Prefer active voice. "We fixed the bug" is shorter and clearer than "The bug was fixed by us".
- Use lists for steps and options instead of long sentences.
- Cut filler words such as "very", "really" and "in order to".
Related tools
Check length with the Word Counter, and find overused words with the Word Frequency Counter.
How to use the Readability Checker
- Type or paste your text into the input box.
- Choose the options you want.
- The result updates instantly as you type.
- Copy the output or download it as a .txt file.