Paste your text to get a Flesch Reading Ease score and estimated grade level.
Paste a paragraph, a page, or a whole draft. The checker counts words and sentences, estimates syllables, and returns a Flesch Reading Ease score out of 100 with the grade level that goes with it. Higher is easier. Both inputs update as you type, so you can edit in place and watch the number move.
Check a representative section rather than the whole document if the document has very different parts. A readable introduction and an unreadable terms section average out to a score that describes neither.
Take a twenty-word paragraph split into two sentences, with about thirty syllables in total.
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Words per sentence | 10 |
| Syllables per word | 1.5 |
| Flesch Reading Ease | 69.8 |
| Grade level | 6.0 |
Now cut one long word. Dropping from 1.5 to 1.4 syllables per word raises the score by about 8 points, because the syllable term is weighted at 84.6 against the sentence-length term at 1.015. That weighting is the practical lesson: in this formula, word length costs you roughly eighty times more than sentence length per unit. Shortening sentences helps; choosing shorter words helps far more.
Flesch Reading Ease was published by Rudolf Flesch in 1948 in the Journal of Applied Psychology, and the grade-level version comes from a 1975 study by J. Peter Kincaid and colleagues for the US Navy. The formula is 206.835 minus 1.015 times average sentence length, minus 84.6 times average syllables per word. Everything the score reports follows from those two averages.
Read the bands as a description of the text, not of the reader. A score in the sixties is plain English that most adults read without effort; a score in the thirties is legal drafting. Neither is automatically wrong. A safety notice should score high. A contract that scores high may be hiding an ambiguity, so simplify the sentence, not the meaning.
The syllable counter is an estimate. It strips common endings and counts vowel groups, which handles most English words and mangles some: abbreviations, product names, and words borrowed from other languages. Long numbers count as one syllable each, which flatters a page of figures. Treat a one or two point difference as noise and look at the trend.
Sixty to seventy suits general web writing. Anything above eighty is very easy, which is right for instructions and wrong for a nuanced argument.
Names, titles and citations are long and full of syllables. The formula sees a harder text; a reader skips that section. Score the body copy separately.
Headings without end punctuation run into the text around them, which inflates the average sentence length. Remove headings before pasting if you want a clean measure of the prose.
No. Short sentences and plain words are how technical writers keep experts reading too. Complexity that does not carry meaning is just friction.
They answer different questions. This tells you how hard the text is; the word counter tells you how long it takes to read. Use both.
The two formulas are the classic Flesch and Flesch-Kincaid equations, implemented here with a syllable guess.
Last updated: November 2, 2026. Reviewed by David Liu.