A reading level checker that gives your text's grade level, compares it with your readers, and marks what to simplify.
Paste your text or a link. You get its reading ease, grade level and reading time, with the sentences and words that make it hard to read marked.
Your text
Paste your text or a link to see its score.
What you paste stays in this browser. The scoring runs on your device; a link is read by my site's reader.
This free reading level checker tells you the school grade a reader needs to follow your writing.
Pick who you're writing for, and it says whether your text is easy enough for them, then marks the sentences and words to simplify.
Here's what reading level means, what level to aim for, and how to lower yours.
What is a reading level?
A reading level is the school grade a reader needs to understand a text easily. It's measured with readability formulas that count sentence length and word length. The best known is the Flesch-Kincaid grade level.
In the UK, the same idea is called reading age: a reading age of 9 is about US grade 4.
What readability score to aim for
It depends on who reads it, but 2 well-known guides agree on the rough range:
- Microsoft Word says most documents should score 60 to 70 on reading ease, and a grade level of about 7.0 to 8.0 (Microsoft Support).
- The NHS writes for a reading age of 9 to 11, which is about US grade 4 to 6, with sentences of up to 20 words and paragraphs of up to 3 sentences (NHS service manual).
Experts reading about their own field can take more, so pick who it's for above and the checker holds your text to that range.
The 6 formulas behind the grade
| Formula | What it counts | Made by |
|---|---|---|
| Flesch reading ease | Words per sentence, syllables per word, on a 0 to 100 scale | Rudolf Flesch, 1948 |
| Flesch-Kincaid grade level | The same 2, as a US school grade | J. Peter Kincaid and others, for the US Navy, 1975 |
| Gunning fog index | Words per sentence and words of 3 or more syllables | Robert Gunning, 1952 |
| SMOG grade | Words of 3 or more syllables | G. Harry McLaughlin, 1969 |
| Coleman-Liau index | Letters per word and sentences per 100 words | Meri Coleman and T. L. Liau, 1975 |
| Automated readability index | Characters per word and words per sentence | E. A. Smith and R. J. Senter, 1967 |
How to make your writing easier to read
The formulas only count 2 things, sentence length and word length, so those are the 2 levers:
- Split long sentences. Anything over 20 words is a candidate. 1 idea per sentence.
- Use the short word. "Use", not "utilize". "Start", not "commence". "Help", not "assist".
- Say who does what. "The team wrote the report", not "The report was written".
- Cut adverbs that add nothing. "Very", "really", "actually" rarely earn their place.
- Keep paragraphs short. 3 sentences or fewer reads well on a phone.
- Writing for the formula, not the reader: short choppy sentences can score well and still read badly
- Swapping every long word: some ideas need their exact term, like "photosynthesis" in a biology post
- Trusting 1 score: check the marked sentences, since the score is only an average
Reading Level Checker FAQs
Questions about the reading level checker? Here's what to know.
For most readers, about grade 7 to 8, the range Microsoft Word recommends. Health and public information aims for grade 4 to 6.
With readability formulas like Flesch-Kincaid, which turn sentence length and word length into a US school grade.
Reading level is a US school grade; reading age, used in the UK, is the reader's age. Grade 4 is about a reading age of 9.
Yes, the reading level checker is free, with no sign-up. The scoring runs on your device.
What you paste into the reading level checker stays in your browser, so it's there when you come back. The text isn't sent to a server, except a link, which my site's reader opens for you.
The reading level checker gives word counts and reading time in any language, but the formulas were built for English, so its scores are for English text.
For writing, the headline analyzer scores your headline against real A/B tests, and the subject line tester checks your email subject. See all my free tools.
Navid Moazzez
AI business strategist & AI OS builder
Navid Moazzez helps creators and founders master AI and build their own AI Operating System (AI OS) to automate their business and life.
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