Free Readability Checker

Our readability checker scores your writing with the Flesch Reading Ease formula, the same 0-100 scale used in style guides and required by several US state plain-language laws. A higher number means easier reading: 60-70 is standard prose, 30 and below reads like an academic paper. Alongside it you get the Flesch-Kincaid grade level, which expresses the same measurement as US school years.

Both formulas work from two ratios: how many words are in your average sentence, and how many syllables are in your average word. That is why the fix is almost always the same — shorter sentences and plainer words — and why the tool shows you the specific sentences responsible rather than only a score.

Two ways to check

Paste text and the analysis runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, there is no captcha, and there is no daily limit, so you can iterate on a draft as fast as you can edit it. Choose "From a URL" and we fetch the page server-side and extract its main article text, skipping navigation, headers and footers so site chrome does not distort the score.

What to do with the result

Work the long-sentence list first: sentences over 20 words are the single biggest lever on both scores, and splitting one in half usually moves the number more than any amount of word-swapping. Then review the passive-voice list. Passive constructions are detected by pattern matching and are not errors — "the study was published in 2024" is perfectly good writing — so treat them as candidates rather than corrections.

What the score does and does not tell you

Readability formulas measure sentence and word length. They do not measure whether your argument is clear, whether the structure makes sense, or whether the content is any good. A page can score 80 and still be useless. Use the number as a signal that your prose may be working harder than it needs to, not as a target to optimise for its own sake.