Readability Score Checker
Paste your text below to see its Flesch Reading Ease score, grade level, and sentence statistics update as you type.
Scores appear here as soon as you start typing.
Analyzed on your device — nothing is sent anywhere.
How it works
- Paste or type your text into the box — at least a few full sentences gives the most reliable score.
- Read the live Flesch Reading Ease score and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level shown below the text.
- Use the plain-English interpretation and sentence stats to shorten sentences or simplify words, then watch the score improve.
Frequently asked questions
- How is the Flesch Reading Ease score calculated?
- The formula is 206.835 − 1.015 × (words per sentence) − 84.6 × (syllables per word). Longer sentences and longer words push the score down, shorter ones push it up. Scores usually land between 0 and 100, where higher means easier to read.
- What is a good readability score for web content?
- Most successful web copy scores between 60 and 70 on the Flesch Reading Ease scale, which corresponds to roughly an 8th- or 9th-grade level. News articles often sit around 50–60, while marketing copy and emails perform best above 60. Academic writing commonly scores below 30 and is fine for its audience.
- How accurate is the syllable counting?
- Syllables are estimated with a heuristic based on vowel groups, silent endings, and common English patterns, since perfect syllable counting requires a full pronunciation dictionary. The estimate is typically within a few percent on normal prose, which is close enough for the scores to be meaningful. Unusual names, acronyms, and technical jargon can shift results slightly.
- Is my text uploaded or stored anywhere?
- No. All counting and scoring runs entirely in your browser with JavaScript, and nothing is sent to any server. You can safely paste confidential drafts, contracts, or unpublished manuscripts.
- Does the checker work for languages other than English?
- The Flesch formulas and the syllable heuristic are calibrated for English, so scores for other languages will not map to the standard interpretation bands. The word and sentence counts remain accurate for most languages that separate words with spaces. For non-English text, treat the grade level as a rough relative signal only.
About this tool
This readability checker scores any English text with the two most widely used formulas: Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level. Paste a blog post, email, product description, or essay and both scores appear instantly, together with word count, sentence count, and average sentence length. A plain-English interpretation tells you whether the text reads like a children’s book, a newspaper, or an academic paper, so you never have to memorize what a score of 54 actually means.
Everything runs locally in your browser. The tool splits your text into sentences at terminal punctuation, counts words, and estimates syllables with a heuristic that groups vowel clusters, discounts silent e endings, and handles common suffixes like -le and -ed. Those three counts feed the classic Flesch formulas published in the 1940s and still used by editors, government agencies, and content teams today. Because no server is involved, unpublished or confidential text stays on your device and results update live as you edit.
Typical uses: content writers tune articles toward the 60–70 range that general audiences read comfortably; UX writers keep interface copy under a 7th-grade level; teachers check whether a passage suits a class; and legal or healthcare teams verify that plain-language rewrites actually got simpler. Comparing the score before and after an edit is often more useful than the absolute number.
A few practical tips: the fastest way to raise a low score is to split long sentences — average sentence length is weighted heavily in both formulas. Swapping three- and four-syllable words for shorter synonyms helps next. Scores stabilize once you have around 100 words, so judge short fragments cautiously, and remember the numbers are estimates, not verdicts on writing quality.