Good ideas lose their audience when the sentences carrying them are hard work. A readability check quantifies that difficulty: this tool analyses your text and reports a Flesch Reading Ease score (0 to 100, higher is easier), the Flesch–Kincaid grade level (the US school grade needed to follow it comfortably), plus the underlying averages — words per sentence and syllables per word — that drive both scores. Paste in a draft article, email, product description or assignment and you will see immediately whether you are writing at the level your readers expect. Web content generally performs best around a grade 7 to 9 level: clear for specialists, effortless for everyone else.
Quick Answer: Paste your text to receive a Flesch Reading Ease score, a reading grade level, and the sentence and word statistics behind them — instantly and privately.
Free Online Tool
Readability Checker
Paste a draft and see how hard it asks your readers to work.
How to Use the Readability Checker
- Paste the text you want to evaluate into the box.
- Press Analyse Readability (or simply watch the live score as you edit).
- Read the Flesch score: 60 to 70 is plain English; below 50 starts to feel academic.
- Check the grade level against your audience — most web readers are comfortable at grade 7 to 9.
- Shorten long sentences and swap heavy words, then re-check until the score fits your readers.
Key Features
- Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level calculated live.
- Supporting statistics: total words, sentences, average sentence length and syllables per word.
- Plain-English verdict that translates the numbers into a human judgement.
- Great for articles, emails, documentation and student work alike.
- Runs entirely in your browser — drafts and documents stay private.
Best Practices and Tips
- Sentence length is the biggest lever: splitting one 35-word sentence usually lifts the score more than changing any single word.
- Prefer short Anglo-Saxon words (‘use’, ‘help’, ‘start’) over Latinate ones (‘utilise’, ‘assistance’, ‘commence’) when both mean the same.
- Read the flagged text aloud; anywhere you run out of breath is a sentence your readers will also struggle with.
- Aim for the audience, not the metric — legal and medical writing may legitimately score lower.
- Check headings and introductions hardest: they decide whether anyone reads the rest.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Gaming the score by chopping every sentence into fragments, which scores well and reads terribly.
- Testing only the first paragraph; readability often drifts as a piece gets longer and denser.
- Assuming a high score means good writing — clarity is necessary, but accuracy and usefulness matter more.
- Ignoring the audience: a score perfect for a research paper will patronise or bore general readers, and vice versa.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a good Flesch Reading Ease score?
For general web content, 60 to 80 is the sweet spot — understandable to most adults. Scores of 50 to 60 suit confident readers, 30 to 50 read like academic writing, and below 30 is best left to specialists in their own field.
What does the grade level mean?
It estimates the US school grade a reader needs to understand the text on first reading. Grade 8 means a typical 13 to 14 year old can follow it. Most newspapers write at grade 8 to 10; popular novels sit lower.
How does the tool count syllables?
It uses a vowel-group heuristic: counting clusters of vowels in each word and applying common rules for silent endings. It is an approximation — unusual names and technical terms can be off by a syllable — but the overall score stays dependable for normal prose.
Can I check a whole article before publishing?
Yes, paste the complete text. Very long documents may take a moment to analyse on slow devices, but there is no word limit and nothing leaves your browser.
Why did my score drop after editing?
Usually because edits added longer words or merged short sentences into longer ones. Look at the average sentence length first — restoring a few full stops in place of commas and semicolons recovers the score quickly.
Related Tools
- Word Counter – counts words, characters, sentences and reading time as you type
- Keyword Density Checker – measures how often a keyword or phrase appears in your copy
- Word Frequency Counter – ranks every word in your text by how often it appears
- Character Counter – tracks characters against a limit, with and without spaces