Readability checker

What it does

A readability checker scores how easy a piece of English is to read. Paste the text and get two standard measures: Flesch Reading Ease, a 0 to 100 scale where higher is easier, and the Flesch-Kincaid grade, the US school year needed to follow it. Both come from sentence length and syllable count, which are shown alongside so you can see what to change. It runs entirely in the browser and recalculates as you edit.

How to use it

1. Paste the body copy. Leave out headings, lists and code, which skew the counts.
2. Read the two headline scores and their labels.
3. Look at the table to see whether long sentences or long words are pulling the score down.
4. Shorten any sentence over 25 words and swap three-syllable words for shorter ones.
5. Watch the score move as you edit, and stop when the label says plain English.

How to read the result

The sample text scores about 75 on Reading Ease, labelled "Easy: most adults", with a grade of about 6. That comes from 13 words per sentence and 1.4 syllables per word. Web copy for a broad audience should sit between 60 and 80; a grade of 6 to 9 is comfortable for most readers on a phone.

If a page scores 42 with a grade of 12, the table will usually show the cause: perhaps 24 words per sentence and 1.8 syllables per word. Each sentence split roughly in half adds several points to the ease score. Replacing "utilise" with "use" and "approximately" with "about" moves the syllable average more than you would expect.

The "Sentences over 25 words" row is the fastest fix. Each one listed is a sentence to break up. Clearing them often lifts a page from "Fairly hard" to "Plain English" without changing what it says.

For raw counts and reading time, use the word counter. We review copy clarity alongside structure in our technical SEO service.