Readability Checker

What Is a Readability Checker?

A readability checker is a text analysis tool that estimates how easy or difficult written content may be for a reader to understand. Readability formulas examine measurable characteristics of writing, including sentence length, word length, syllable counts and the frequency of longer words.

Readability analysis can be useful when writing or editing website content, articles, essays, reports, educational resources, documentation and other material. Comparing several formulas can provide a broader view of the characteristics that influence the apparent difficulty of a passage.

Why Use a Readability Checker?

Readable content is easier for an intended audience to process. A readability checker can identify text characteristics that may make content unnecessarily difficult, allowing writers to review sentence structure and word choice.

How to Use the Readability Checker

You can analyse an article, paragraph, essay, report or other written content in a few simple steps.

1. Enter your text — Paste or type the content you want to analyse into the text box.
2. Start the analysis — Select Check Readability to calculate the readability measurements.
3. Review the scores — Examine the Flesch Reading Ease, grade level and other readability formulas.
4. Review the statistics — Use the word, sentence, syllable and complexity statistics to identify characteristics that may affect readability.

Understanding Readability Scores

Readability scores are numerical estimates produced by formulas designed to assess characteristics associated with text difficulty. Different formulas use different measurements and scales, which means that their results should not be compared as though they were identical scoring systems.

The Flesch Reading Ease score generally becomes higher as text becomes easier to read. Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, Gunning Fog, SMOG, Coleman-Liau and Automated Readability Index generally express their results as estimated grade levels, where lower values normally indicate simpler text.

Flesch Reading Ease

Flesch Reading Ease considers average sentence length and average syllables per word. Higher scores generally indicate easier-to-read text, while lower scores generally indicate more difficult text.

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level estimates the US school grade level associated with the characteristics of the text. It uses average words per sentence and average syllables per word.

How to Improve Readability

If your text receives a high grade-level result or a low Flesch Reading Ease score, consider reviewing long sentences, unnecessary technical terms and unnecessarily complicated wording. Breaking long sentences into shorter sentences can make information easier to process.

However, the lowest possible readability score is not always the correct objective. Technical, academic and professional content may legitimately require specialised terminology. The appropriate readability level depends on the intended audience, purpose and subject matter of the content.

Frequently Asked Questions