Readability Checker
Get the reading age of your writing across six standard formulas — and see exactly which sentences are dragging it up, highlighted in the text itself.
The hard sentences get highlighted here.
Runs entirely in this browser. Nothing you type is uploaded, stored or seen by us.
Three steps, no account.
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01
Paste your writing
A few paragraphs is enough for the formulas to be meaningful.
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02
Read the grade
Six formulas, plus an average. They disagree slightly by design; the spread is more honest than any single figure.
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03
Fix the highlighted sentences
Amber is long, red is very long. Splitting two or three of them usually moves the whole score.
A readability score is a proxy for effort: how much work a reader has to do to get your meaning. Every standard formula approximates it the same way, from sentence length and word length, because long sentences and long words are what make prose hard to follow.
A single grade number is not very actionable, though — knowing you write at grade 14 does not tell you what to change. So this also marks the sentences responsible, which is usually a handful of them rather than the whole piece.
Readability Checker, answered.
For general web writing, a Flesch Reading Ease of 60 to 70 — roughly a UK school Year 9 reading level, or US grade 8 to 9. Most national newspapers sit around there. Technical or academic writing legitimately sits higher, and there is no virtue in forcing specialist material down to a level that costs it precision.
They use the same inputs and read in opposite directions. Reading Ease is a 0 to 100 score where higher is easier. Flesch-Kincaid converts that to a US school grade level, where higher is harder. Reading Ease is the more useful of the two for judging web copy at a glance.
They were built for different purposes and weight things differently — SMOG was designed for health materials and is deliberately conservative, Coleman-Liau counts characters rather than syllables, Gunning Fog focuses on words of three or more syllables. Treat the spread as a range rather than picking whichever one flatters the text.
Not as a direct ranking signal. It affects the things that are measured: whether people stay on the page, finish it and act on it. A page nobody can get through does not perform, whatever its score says.
Other tools for the same job.
This is one job. The workspace does the rest.
The free tools stay free and stay ungated. Recast is where they stop being separate tabs and start handing work to each other — a link becomes a card, an article and a week of posts without you moving anything between them.