Writing & Text

Readability Score Calculator

Paste your writing to see how easy it is to read — with Flesch Reading Ease, grade levels from five other formulas, and a count of complex words. Great for essays, blog posts and client emails.

Try an example

Readability analysis

Enter some text to see its readability scores

  • Six formulas

    Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid, Gunning Fog, SMOG, Coleman-Liau and the Automated Readability Index.

  • Know your audience

    Each score comes with a plain-English level and the audience it suits, from young readers to academics.

  • Detailed stats

    Words, sentences, words per sentence, syllables per word and the share of complex words.

Free online readability calculator

Readability formulas estimate how hard a piece of English text is to read, using sentence length and word length (syllables or letters). They're a quick, objective check before you submit an assignment, publish a blog post or send a proposal to a client.

Understanding the scores

  • Flesch Reading Ease (0–100): higher is easier. 90–100 is very easy, 60–70 is plain English, and below 30 is very difficult.
  • Flesch-Kincaid grade: the U.S. school grade needed to understand the text. Grades 1–6 are elementary, 7–8 middle school, 9–12 high school and 13+ college.
  • Gunning Fog index: years of formal education needed. Below 8 is easy; 12 and above is hard for most readers.
  • SMOG index: also years of education, based on words with three or more syllables. It needs at least 3 sentences — and is most reliable with 30.
  • Coleman-Liau and ARI: grade levels based on letters or characters per word instead of syllables.

Ideal Flesch scores

  • Web pages and blog posts: 60–80
  • Marketing copy: 70–80
  • Technical documentation: 50–60
  • Academic papers: 30–50
  • Children's content: 80–90

Tips to make your writing easier to read

  • Keep sentences to about 15–20 words on average.
  • Swap long words for simpler ones where you can (“use” instead of “utilise”).
  • Prefer the active voice: “We fixed the bug”, not “The bug was fixed”.
  • Break up long paragraphs with headings and bullet points.
  • Read it aloud — if you run out of breath, the sentence is too long.

Syllables are counted with an English-language heuristic, so scores are estimates. The formulas are designed for English and won't give meaningful results for Urdu or Roman Urdu text.

Private by design. Everything runs in your browser — nothing you enter is uploaded or stored by AISeekho.

More free tools