Check how readable your English text is
Docs, emails, landing copy — Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch–Kincaid grade level give a quick number to aim at before you ship the text.
Tools used in this guide
The job
"Write for an eighth-grade reading level" is common advice for public-facing copy. These formulas turn sentence length and syllable density into two numbers you can track while editing.
How to do it
Paste the text and read the two scores: Flesch Reading Ease (0–100, higher is easier) and Flesch–Kincaid grade level (the US school grade the text suits). A difficulty band summarizes where it lands, with the underlying sentence, word, and syllable counts shown.
- Shorter sentences and shorter words both push the score toward easier.
- Use it while editing — the score updates when you re-check, so you can watch the effect of a rewrite.
Worked example
A dense policy paragraph scoring grade 16 might read as grade 9 after splitting two long sentences — the word count barely changes, but the averages do.
Limits
Syllables are counted heuristically, so the scores are approximations — meaningful for English text, not for other languages and not a definitive measure of comprehension. Input up to 500,000 characters.