Flesch Readability Scorer
Paste a paragraph to get its Flesch Reading Ease score and Flesch–Kincaid grade level, with the sentence, word, and syllable counts that produce them.
Readability
Higher Reading Ease (0–100) means easier text; the grade level estimates the U.S. school grade needed to read it. Syllables are counted by a heuristic, so scores are close estimates for comparing drafts.
Reading ease, grade level, and clear writing
Readability formulas reward two habits: shorter sentences and simpler words. They cannot judge whether your argument holds together, but they are a fast, objective way to notice when prose has drifted into long, multi-clause sentences that are hard to follow — a common problem in first drafts and in text generated by AI.
Use the score as a signal, not a target to game. If a passage scores as difficult, look for sentences you can split, jargon you can define, and clauses you can cut. Clarity and rigour are not opposites; the best academic writing is precise and readable at once.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Flesch Reading Ease score?
It is a readability formula that rates text from roughly 0 to 100, where higher means easier to read. It is based on average sentence length and average syllables per word: shorter sentences and shorter words score higher. Scores of 60–70 are considered plain English.
What does the grade level mean?
The Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level translates the same sentence-length and syllable measures into a U.S. school grade. A grade level of 8 means the text should be readable by an average eighth-grader. It is a useful target when you want writing to reach a broad audience.
How accurate are the scores?
The formulas only measure sentence length and syllable counts — not vocabulary difficulty, logic, or organisation. Syllables are counted by a heuristic that is close but not perfect. Use the scores to compare drafts and spot dense passages, not as an absolute verdict on quality.
Should academic writing aim for a high score?
Not necessarily. Scholarly writing is naturally denser than general prose because of specialist terms and complex ideas. The goal is clarity within your field's conventions: prefer shorter sentences and plainer words where they do not sacrifice precision.
Educational tool only. Scores estimate readability from sentence and syllable counts and do not assess accuracy or quality.