Readability Checker

Writing that is hard to read gets abandoned, and most writers cannot judge their own prose because they already know what it means. Our free readability checker runs six standard formulas over your text and tells you, in plain terms, what reading level it lands at.

You get Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid Grade, Gunning Fog, SMOG, Coleman-Liau, and the Automated Readability Index together, because they weight different things. Gunning Fog and SMOG care about complex words; Coleman-Liau and ARI use character counts rather than syllables; Flesch weighs sentence length heavily. Agreement across all six is a reliable signal. Disagreement usually means something specific — very long sentences of very short words, or the reverse.

Here is the honest caveat that most readability tools skip: every one of these formulas counts syllables, and English syllable counting cannot be done exactly without a dictionary. 'Business' and 'hideous' defeat the same heuristic that every tool in this category uses, including this one. The scores are close enough to steer by and precise enough to mislead if you treat them as measurements.

What actually moves them is simple: shorter sentences and shorter words, with sentence length doing most of the work since it appears in all six calculations. Pair this with the Word Counter for length targets, the Reading Time Calculator to set expectations, and the Grammar Checker before you publish.