Readability Score Checker
Six readability formulas at once, plus the exact sentences making your writing harder to read than it needs to be.
Text Statistics
Hardest Sentences
About this tool
What this readability checker does
"Write at an 8th-grade level" is the kind of advice every editor gives and almost nobody can actually verify by eye. This tool runs your text through six of the readability formulas editors, SEO teams, and instructional designers actually use — Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, Gunning Fog, SMOG, Coleman-Liau, and the Automated Readability Index — and averages them into one plain-English grade level, instead of making you cross-reference a single score against a chart.
Most readability checkers online stop at Flesch-Kincaid alone. Running all six matters because they don't always agree — Gunning Fog leans harder on "complex" (3+ syllable) words, while Coleman-Liau and ARI use character counts instead of syllables, which makes them more reliable on text with abbreviations or numbers. Seeing where they cluster (or where the SMOG score jumps out) tells you more than any single number.
How to use it
Paste in a blog post, product description, email, or anything else you're editing. Scores update live once you've got roughly 30+ words in — shorter snippets skew the math since these formulas were built for full paragraphs, not headlines. Below the scores you'll get the word/sentence/syllable counts behind them, plus your text's three longest sentences, which are almost always the fastest thing to fix if your grade level is coming in higher than you want.
A real example
A sentence like "The comprehensive implementation of this multifaceted methodology necessitates careful consideration of numerous interdependent variables" scores around a college-graduate reading level on every formula here. Split it into two shorter sentences with simpler words — "This method has a lot of moving parts. Each one needs careful thought." — and the same idea drops to roughly a 4th-6th grade level. That's the entire game: shorter sentences, fewer syllables, same meaning.
Frequently asked questions
What reading level should my writing target?
General web content and marketing copy usually aims for 7th-9th grade (a Flesch Reading Ease score in the 60-70 range) — readable on a phone, skimmed in a hurry. Technical documentation or academic writing can run higher; anything aimed at a broad consumer audience should usually run lower.
Why do the six scores disagree with each other?
Each formula weighs sentence length and word complexity slightly differently — some count syllables, some count characters, some weight "hard words" (3+ syllables) more heavily than others. Small disagreements are normal; if they're all clustered within a grade or two of each other, that's your real reading level.
Does punctuation or paragraph breaks affect the score?
Sentence boundaries (periods, question marks, exclamation points) matter a lot since every formula uses average sentence length. Paragraph breaks themselves don't factor into the math, but shorter paragraphs usually correlate with shorter sentences anyway.
Is this the same readability check Word or Google Docs uses?
It's the same underlying Flesch-Kincaid formula Microsoft Word uses for its "grade level" stat — this tool just adds five more formulas alongside it and highlights the sentences actually causing the score to climb.
Is my text uploaded anywhere?
No — everything is calculated locally in your browser. Nothing you paste is sent to a server or stored.