Readability Score Calculator

What Flesch Reading Ease and grade level actually mean

Flesch Reading Ease scores a text from roughly 0 to 100, where higher means easier to read. A score in the 60 to 70 range is considered plain English, understandable by most 13 to 15 year olds, and is the rough target most web copy, help docs and marketing pages aim for. The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level takes the same underlying inputs, average sentence length and average syllables per word, and converts them into a US school grade, so a 7.0 means the text reads at roughly a 7th grade level.

How this calculator works

Both formulas use only three raw counts: the number of words, the number of sentences, and the number of syllables. Reading Ease is 206.835 minus 1.015 times words per sentence, minus 84.6 times syllables per word. Grade Level is 0.39 times words per sentence, plus 11.8 times syllables per word, minus 15.59. Syllables are estimated using a standard vowel-group heuristic, the same approach used by most readability tools, since there is no perfectly reliable way to count syllables from spelling alone in English.

What to do with a low score

A low Reading Ease score usually points to one of two fixable problems: sentences that run too long, or word choices that are more complex than they need to be. Try breaking multi-clause sentences into two shorter ones and swapping a multi-syllable word for a shorter, more common synonym where the meaning does not change, then paste the revised text back in to see the score move.