Readability Checker & Grade Level Calculator
Check the readability of your text with the Flesch Reading Ease score and reading grade level. Make articles, emails and essays easier for your audience to read.
Reading Ease
Grade Level
Paragraphs
0Sentences
0Structural Analysis
Avg. Sentence Length
0 words per sentence
Tip: A standard reading level is between 60 and 70. Aim for shorter sentences to improve clarity for global audiences.
About this tool
Score any piece of writing with the Flesch Reading Ease formula and its equivalent school grade level, revealing whether your audience can actually absorb what you wrote. Content teams, technical writers, and educators use it to catch prose that quietly drifted into PhD territory.
How to Check Readability
- 1
Paste the text you want scored — a blog draft, product page, help article, or classroom handout.
- 2
Read the Flesch Reading Ease score (higher means easier) and the estimated grade level, calculated from your sentence lengths and word syllable counts.
- 3
Revise the flagged complexity — shorten sentences, swap polysyllabic words — and re-check until the score matches your intended audience.
Why Check Readability with Wrklyst
- Unpublished Work Stays Unpublished
- Scoring is arithmetic your browser does on the spot; drafts aren't uploaded to be counted, cached, or crawled.
- Feedback at Editing Speed
- Scores recompute instantly on every revision, so you can watch a rewrite drag the grade level down in real time.
- The Full Metric, Free
- Both the ease score and grade estimate are simply shown — not teased behind an upgrade prompt.
Improving Your Score Honestly
- Cut sentence length first — splitting one 40-word sentence into two does more than any word swap.
- Replace "utilize" with "use" and its cousins; polysyllabic Latin words inflate grades without adding meaning.
- Check the intro separately — readers decide whether to continue within the first three sentences.
- Re-score after edits from stakeholders; committee revisions reliably push text upmarket.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good Flesch Reading Ease score?
For general audiences, aim for 60–70, which reads comfortably at an eighth-to-ninth-grade level — the range most newspapers target. Marketing copy often goes higher (easier) at 70–80. Scores below 50 suit specialist readers only, and below 30 signals genuinely difficult academic prose.
How is the grade level actually calculated?
The formulas combine two measurable ingredients: average sentence length in words and average syllables per word. Long sentences full of polysyllabic words drive the grade up; short sentences of short words bring it down. It's mechanical — which is why it's consistent and gameable in equal measure.
Why does readability matter for a website?
Visitors skim, and text above their comfortable level gets abandoned rather than deciphered — hurting conversions, support-article effectiveness, and time on page. Roughly half of adults read most comfortably below a ninth-grade level, so accessible copy isn't dumbing down; it's meeting the actual audience.
Should every text aim for maximum easiness?
No — match the reader. A physics paper written at fifth-grade level would waste experts' time with padding, while consumer banking terms at postgraduate level fail their duty to inform. The score is a mirror, not a target; decide who's reading, then write to their level deliberately.