Readability Checker

Our readability checker tool gives you a complete picture of how readable your writing is, with clear score breakdowns and plain-language explanations. But readability scores aren’t the be-all and end-all of good writing.

There is No Perfect Readability Score

There is no single perfect score that all writing should reach. The right result depends on your audience, subject, and purpose. Readability results generally fall into two categories:

Reading Ease Score: Flesch Reading Ease uses a 0–100 scale, where higher scores usually mean the text is easier to read.

U.S. Grade Level Scores: Flesch-Kincaid, Gunning Fog, SMOG, Coleman-Liau, and ARI estimate the school grade level a reader may need to understand the text. Lower grades are better.

Flesch Reading Ease Score

Flesch Reading Ease measures how easy or difficult your writing is to read on a scale from 0 to 100. A higher score means easier reading, while a lower score means the text is more complex.

Use this score as a quick way to judge the overall ease of understanding your content. 

U.S. Grade Level Scores

The other five readability formulas estimate the U.S. school grade level a reader may need to understand your writing.

These include:

• Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level
• Gunning Fog Index
• SMOG Index
• Coleman-Liau Index
• Automated Readability Index (ARI)

A score of 8, for example, generally means the text is written at around an eighth-grade reading level.

The formulas calculate grade level differently. Flesch-Kincaid looks at sentence length and syllables, Gunning Fog and SMOG pay more attention to complex or polysyllabic words, while Coleman-Liau and ARI use characters and sentence length.

That means the scores may vary slightly. Instead of focusing on one exact number, look at the overall range to understand whether your writing matches your intended audience.