Text Analysis
Readability Checker
Check Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid grade level, Gunning Fog, Coleman-Liau, and SMOG scores.
About the readability checker
Paste a passage and it gets scored by five classic formulas: Flesch Reading Ease, the Flesch-Kincaid grade level, Gunning Fog, Coleman-Liau and SMOG. Next to the scores sits a plain label for the Flesch result: Easy to read from 80 up, Plain English from 60, Difficult from 40 and College level below that. All five were built for English and measure the same two things in different ways: how long the sentences are and how long the words are. Flesch Reading Ease usually lands between 0 and 100, and higher means easier. The other four give a US school grade, where 8 means a typical 13 or 14 year old should follow the text. Gunning Fog and SMOG count words of three or more syllables, Coleman-Liau counts letters instead, and Flesch-Kincaid uses the average number of syllables per word. Syllables are estimated by counting groups of vowels in each word and ignoring a final e, so scores can differ a little from checkers that look words up in a dictionary. Sentences end at full stops, question marks and exclamation marks. SMOG was designed around samples of 30 sentences, so treat it as rough on anything shorter. The text is scored in your browser.
Frequently asked questions
Which score should I trust?
None of them is more correct than the rest; they just weigh sentence length and word length differently. Pick one and use it to compare drafts of the same text, watching which way it moves. For a general audience, a Flesch score between 60 and 70 counts as plain English, easily understood by 13 to 15 year olds.
How can I make my text easier to read?
Start with the long words. In the Flesch-Kincaid formula, cutting the average by a tenth of a syllable per word lowers the grade about as much as removing three words from every sentence. Swap utilize for use and commence for start, then split any sentence that carries two ideas.
What do real publications score?
The Wikipedia article on the Flesch tests gives Reader's Digest a reading ease of about 65, Time magazine about 52 and the Harvard Law Review the low 30s. Those make handy reference points when you decide how plain your own writing should be.
Why is the grade negative or above 12?
The formulas have no floor or ceiling. A few very short, simple sentences can push a grade below zero, and long academic sentences can go well past 12 into college years. A single sentence gives jumpy numbers, so paste at least a few paragraphs.
Does it work for languages other than English?
Not reliably. The syllable estimate and all five formulas are tuned to English, so a French, German or Spanish text gets numbers that mean very little. For those languages, look for a formula made for that language and use the counts from the Word Counter in the meantime.