Readability Score Checker

Scores run from 0 to 100 and higher means easier. Above 90 is very easy, readable by an average 11-year-old. 60 to 70 is plain English, understood by 13- to 15-year-olds — this is the range most general web writing should sit in. 30 to 50 is difficult, typical of academic prose. Below 30 is very hard, the territory of legal and technical documents. Reader's Digest scores around 65 and a typical academic paper around 30, which gives you a feel for what the numbers describe.

Because they measure different things. Flesch-Kincaid, Gunning Fog and SMOG count syllables or long words; Coleman-Liau and the Automated Readability Index count letters instead, since letters are easier to compute reliably. So a text full of short-but-multisyllabic words scores harder on Fog and easier on Coleman-Liau, while a text of long-but-simple words does the reverse. Each was also calibrated on a different corpus — SMOG on health materials, Flesch-Kincaid on U.S. Navy training manuals. A spread of two or three grades across the six is completely normal, which is why this tool reports the average rather than picking a winner.

They use the same two inputs — average sentence length and average syllables per word — but express the answer on opposite scales. Reading Ease is a 0 to 100 score where higher is easier. Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level converts the same measurement into a U.S. school grade, where higher is harder, so grade 8 means an average 13- to 14-year-old should follow it. Reading Ease is the better number for comparing two drafts of the same piece; the grade level is the better number when a brief or a style guide states a target.

Each word is lowercased, a silent trailing 'e' is dropped, and the remaining vowel groups are counted. This is the standard heuristic these formulas were validated against, and it is right for the large majority of English words, but it is an approximation: exact syllabification needs a pronunciation dictionary. It undercounts words where adjacent vowels are pronounced separately ('create', 'reality') and overcounts some silent endings. Across a paragraph the errors largely cancel, which is why a score on 100 words is far more trustworthy than a score on 10.

Not directly. Google has stated repeatedly that it does not compute a readability score as a ranking factor, and no grade level will lift a page on its own. The indirect effect is real: text an audience can follow gets read further, earns links and gets cited, and a clearly written passage is more likely to be pulled into a featured snippet. Treat the score as a check on whether you are writing for your reader, not as a lever to pull for search.

For a general audience, grade 8 to 10 is the usual target and matches the 60 to 70 Reading Ease band. For public health and government information the guidance is lower — the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recommends writing for a grade 6 to 8 level, because material aimed at the general public has to work for the least confident readers in it, not the average one. For a specialist or academic audience a higher grade is appropriate and forcing it down produces writing that is imprecise rather than clear.

No. Every formula here was derived from and calibrated on English text, and each one assumes English relationships between word length, syllable count and difficulty. Run German, Spanish or Finnish through them and you will get a number, but it will not mean what it means in English — agglutinative and compound-heavy languages score as far harder than they read. Several languages have their own adapted formulas, such as Fernández Huerta for Spanish and the Wiener Sachtextformel for German; use one of those instead.