Readability Checker
Measure reading ease and grade level, and highlight the sentences dragging the score down, so you can fix the paragraph rather than the average.
Browser tool
Text
Paste text, Markdown or HTML, or upload a file. Scripts, styles and markup are removed before counting; nothing leaves your device.
About Readability Checker
Readability formulas measure sentence length and word length and nothing else, which makes them a blunt instrument that is genuinely useful anyway: they reliably find the paragraph you wrote at the end of a long day and never re-read. Reading the score is free and requires no login. Your text is measured in the page and does not travel.
How to use Readability Checker
- Paste the text or open a fileMarkdown and HTML are stripped to their prose first, so syntax is not counted as words.
- Read the score as a rangeThe difference between 55 and 60 means nothing. The difference between 30 and 60 means a great deal.
- Look at the highlighted sentencesThis is the actionable part — the specific sentences dragging the average down are usually fixable in a minute.
What the formulas actually measure
Flesch Reading Ease and its relatives count syllables per word and words per sentence, then combine them. They have no notion of meaning, jargon, structure or argument, which is why a page of fluent nonsense can score beautifully and a precise technical explanation can score badly while being exactly right for its reader. Use the score to find long sentences, not to judge whether prose is good.
What it does not do
- A score cannot tell you whether the writing is accurate, well argued or appropriate for its audience.
- Technical writing legitimately scores lower. Chasing a target by breaking necessary terms into shorter words makes it worse, not better.
- The formulas were developed for English and mean little applied to other languages.
Readability Checker: questions people ask
- What score should I aim for?
- It depends entirely on the reader. General web writing often targets a score around 60, technical documentation reasonably sits lower, and a children's page should be far higher. Consistency within a publication matters more than hitting a number.
- Does readability affect ranking?
- Not directly — there is no readability score in ranking. It affects whether people stay and understand, which is the thing worth caring about, and the score is a proxy for it rather than a target in itself.
- Can I check the readability of a Word document?
- Not directly, because the checker accepts TXT, Markdown and HTML files rather than .docx. Copy the text out of Word and paste it in to get Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch–Kincaid grade, Gunning Fog, SMOG, Coleman–Liau and ARI scores, with long sentences highlighted.
Questions about ToolsVerse itself — privacy, cost, what happens to your files — are answered in the frequently asked questions.
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