Readability Checker

Readability Checker tells you how easy your writing is to read, and where it gets hard. Paste an article, a school essay, a letter to customers or a web page, and it works out six well-known scores at once: Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch–Kincaid Grade, Gunning Fog, SMOG, Coleman–Liau and the Automated Readability Index. The five grade scores are averaged into a single reading level with the age it suits, so you don’t have to weigh them up yourself.

Scores alone don’t tell you what to fix, so the tool redraws your text with the problem spots marked: sentences that run too long, words of three or more syllables, phrases that look like passive voice, adverbs, and wordy words that have a plainer swap (“utilise” → “use”, “in order to” → “to”). Choose who you are writing for, from the general public to experts, and the targets and suggestions change to match.

It is a writing coach, not a word counter: the counts it shows are the ones the formulas use. Everything is worked out in your browser, so drafts, reports and private letters stay on your device.

1. Paste or type your writing into “Your text”, or press “Try an example” to see how it works.
2. Under “Written for”, choose General public, Students or Experts.
3. Read the reading level and verdict at the top, then the six scores and what each means.
4. Look at “Your text, marked up”. Tap the coloured keys to show or hide each kind of mark.
5. Work through “Suggestions”. “Show me” jumps to the sentence or word it is talking about. Edit your text and the scores update as you go.

• Six scores using their published formulas: Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch–Kincaid Grade, Gunning Fog, SMOG, Coleman–Liau and ARI.
• A consensus reading level (the average of the five grade scores) shown as a US grade, an age range and a UK school year.
• Three audiences, each with its own targets for grade, reading ease, sentence length and share of hard words.
• Highlights for long and very long sentences, hard words, likely passive voice, -ly adverbs and wordy words or phrases, each switchable on and off.
• Plain-word swaps for about 140 wordy words and phrases, shown when you hover or tap.
• Suggestions written in plain English, each with a “Show me” button that jumps to the example.
• A syllable counter written for English, with rules for silent and split vowels and a list of awkward words such as “business”, “every” and “idea”.
• Sentence splitting that copes with Mr., Dr., e.g., initials, decimals and headings on their own line.

• Give it at least 100 words. One or two sentences swing the scores wildly; a few paragraphs give a fair reading. SMOG in particular was designed for 30 sentences or more.
• Most newspapers and government sites aim for grade 8 or below (a Reading Ease of 60 or more). That isn’t talking down to readers: experts read plain text faster too.
• The scores only count sentence length and word length. “The cat sat on the mat” and nonsense of the same shape score alike, so read your text back, too.
• Syllables are counted by rules, not a dictionary. On words it was not tuned on, the counter matches a dictionary about 96% of the time, so scores can differ slightly from other checkers. Numbers count as one syllable.
• Passive voice is spotted by pattern, so “she is tired” gets flagged even though it is fine. Keep the passive when the doer doesn’t matter: “The road was closed at noon.”