Text Statistics

Readability scores give you a number — but what you do with that number depends entirely on who you're writing for. A Flesch Reading Ease of 65 is fine for a general news article. The same score would be too hard for an elementary school textbook and too easy for a legal brief. The tool shows you multiple scores at once: Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level, and Gunning Fog Index. They weight syllable counts and sentence lengths differently, which is why they sometimes disagree. Take the spread, not just one number. If all three say the same thing, that's your answer.

Average sentence length is the single easiest thing to change

Most readability issues come from sentences that run too long. Not from word choice, not from paragraph density — from sentences that pack in too many clauses. The stat you want to watch is average words per sentence. Above 25 words per sentence consistently, and most readers will lose the thread. Below 12 is choppy. The sweet spot for web content is roughly 15–20. This tool calculates it automatically. If it's reading high, look at the sentences flagged as the longest outliers and split them. That alone often drops the grade level by one or two points without changing any vocabulary.