Readability Checker
A Flesch score, and the three sentences that are dragging it down.
Free, no signup, no limits
Hardest sentences, worth rewriting first
The implementation of a comprehensive content strategy necessitates the systematic reevaluation of preexisting editorial methodologies, particularly insofar as such methodologies demonstrably contribute to reader disengagement.
The score for a whole page tells you the writing is hard, but the sentences dragging it down tell you what to rewrite.
Paste your text on the left and the score appears here.
What a Flesch reading ease score means
A number from roughly 0 to 100, where higher is easier. The bands are Flesch's own:
| Score | Reads as |
|---|---|
| 90 and up | An eleven year old is comfortable |
| 80 to 90 | Conversational, most popular fiction |
| 70 to 80 | Plain English, where most web writing belongs |
| 60 to 70 | A thirteen to fifteen year old follows it |
| 50 to 60 | Some effort, broadsheet newspaper level |
| 30 to 50 | Undergraduate, fine for a technical audience |
| Under 30 | Academic or legal, most readers give up |
Aim for 60 to 70 unless you know your readers well. Below 50, people do not decide your writing is sophisticated, they decide to stop.
Two things move the score, and only two
The average length of your sentences, and the average number of syllables in your words. That is the entire formula.
Which makes it very easy to act on. If the score is low, either the sentences are long or the words are. The two figures are shown separately for exactly that reason: under twenty words a sentence and under 1.5 syllables a word is plain English, and you can see at a glance which one you are failing.
It also means the score is easy to cheat. Chop every sentence in half at a comma and the number climbs without the writing improving. Use it as a thermometer, not a target.
Your hardest sentences are the useful output
A score for a whole page tells you the writing is hard. It does not tell you where.
So every sentence is also scored on its own, and the three worst are shown in full. On a typical page it is two or three sentences dragging everything else down, usually the ones written last when you were tired and trying to be precise. Fixing those moves the score more than rewriting anything else, and takes five minutes.
Sentences under eight words are left out of that list. The formula is unstable on very short input, and a three word sentence scoring badly is an artefact rather than a problem.
English only, and that is not a limitation to work around
The constants in both formulas were fitted to English in 1948, and the syllable counting is built on English spelling rules.
Paste in French, German or Spanish and you will get a number, because arithmetic does not know it is being misused. The number will be meaningless. Other languages have their own formulas, Kandel-Moles for French and Wiener Sachtextformel for German, with different constants.
What else tells you something
The word counter shows the single longest sentence in the text, which overlaps with what you see here but catches the case where one enormous sentence hides behind an otherwise decent average.
The keyword density checker answers a different question: not how hard the page is to read, but what it is about.
Everything runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
Frequently asked questions
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