A readability checker that scores your text with 6 published formulas and marks the sentences and words that make it hard to read.
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.
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What you paste stays in this browser. The scoring runs on your device; a link is read by my site's reader.
This free readability checker scores any text or web page for how easy it is to read.
It runs the 6 best-known readability formulas, gives your reading time, and marks the long sentences, hard words and passive voice that pull your score down.
Here's what the scores mean, what to aim for, and how to make your writing easier to read.
What is readability?
Readability is how easy a text is to read and understand. A readability score measures it from the text itself: mostly how long the sentences are and how long the words are.
The 6 readability formulas
| 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 |
The first 2 are the ones Microsoft Word shows. The others weigh the same things a little differently, so a text's grades land close together.
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.
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
How to check readability in Microsoft Word
Word has the same 2 Flesch scores built in, shown after a spelling and grammar check (Microsoft Support):
This checker gives you the same 2 scores in your browser, plus 4 more formulas, reading time, and the exact sentences to fix.
Reading time
Reading time uses 238 words a minute for silent reading and 183 for reading aloud. Those are the averages across 190 studies of adult readers of English (Brysbaert, 2019, Journal of Memory and Language).
Readability Checker FAQs
Questions about the readability checker? Here's what to know.
A readability checker scores how easy a text is to read, from its sentence and word length, and shows what makes it hard.
For most readers, a reading ease of 60 to 70 and a grade level of about 7 to 8, the range Microsoft Word recommends.
Readability formulas count sentence length and word length. Flesch reading ease uses syllables per word; others use letters or long words.
Yes, the readability checker is free, with no sign-up. The scoring runs on your device.
What you paste into the readability 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 readability 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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