What is a good Flesch Reading Ease score?

Scores of 60-70 are plain English readable by most adults. 70-90 is easy and conversational. Below 30 is very difficult and suited to academic or technical readers. Aim for 60+ for general web copy.

How are syllables counted?

Each word is scanned for vowel groups, with silent endings like a trailing 'e' or '-es' removed and very short words counted as one syllable. This vowel-group heuristic matches the standard Flesch approach closely for English prose.

What is the difference between Reading Ease and Grade Level?

Both use the same word, sentence, and syllable inputs but different formulas. Reading Ease gives a 0-100 score where higher means easier, while Grade Level maps the text to a U.S. school grade, so 8.0 means an average eighth-grader can follow it.

Why did my score change after editing one sentence?

The formulas are sensitive to average sentence length and syllables per word. Splitting one long sentence into two, or replacing a long word, changes those averages and can move the score by several points.

Is my text sent anywhere?

No. All counting and scoring happens locally in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, stored, or logged, so it is safe to paste private drafts.

English Flesch-Kincaid Readability

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The Flesch-Kincaid readability tests estimate how hard a piece of English text is to read. They are widely used in journalism, government plain-language guidelines, and content marketing because they turn a fuzzy idea — “is this easy to read?” — into two concrete numbers from only three inputs.

How it works

Both formulas use total words, total sentences, and total syllables. Define average sentence length as words divided by sentences, and average word length as syllables divided by words. The two scores are then:

Reading Ease = 206.835 − 1.015 × (words/sentences) − 84.6 × (syllables/words)
Grade Level  = 0.39 × (words/sentences) + 11.8 × (syllables/words) − 15.59

Reading Ease runs roughly from 0 (very hard) to 100 (very easy); Grade Level maps onto U.S. school grades. Syllables are estimated by counting vowel groups in each word after stripping common silent endings, which is the standard practical approximation for English.

Tips and example

The sentence “The cat sat on the mat” is short with single-syllable words, so it scores near the top of the Reading Ease scale. A sentence packed with long clauses and words like “notwithstanding” and “infrastructure” pushes the Grade Level up sharply. To make text easier, cut sentence length first — average sentence length carries heavy weight in both formulas — then replace long words where a shorter synonym exists. For most public-facing web copy, target a Reading Ease of 60 or higher and a Grade Level around 8.