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Use one notice, email, article section, instruction, or draft at a time.
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Choose the audience whose reading burden you are trying to manage.
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Use line-aware mode for bullets, notes, and slide text with sparse punctuation.
Choose 8–80 words to tune sentence review for the current style guide.
words
Three syllables is the conventional default; change it only for a documented review rule.
syllables
Choose 6–24 letters to tune vocabulary review.
letters
Optional, for example Benefits email v2.
SignalObservedEditorial readingCopy
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PriorityTriggerPassage evidenceRevision cueCopy
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Reading Level Checker Check an English passage across five grade formulas, compare its target grade band, and find sentences or words worth revising.
Word Counter Count words and measure readability locally in drafts or TXT files, with configurable token rules and focused repetition checks for editing.
Reading Fluency WCPM Calculator Calculate words correct per minute from a timed oral-reading probe, then compare accuracy and grade-season benchmark context.
Decodable Reading Passage Generator Generate a phonics-aligned reading passage from controlled sentence banks, then review coverage and words needing teacher attention.

Readability estimates describe the surface effort needed to move through a passage. They respond mainly to sentence length, word length, and estimated syllables. Editors use them to spot dense drafts, compare revisions, and check whether public information is likely to suit its intended audience.

A grade estimate is not a judgment of writing quality or reader ability. A short legal term may be harder than its syllable count suggests, while a long familiar phrase may be easy in context. Purpose, structure, prior knowledge, typography, language proficiency, and the accuracy of the instructions still require human review.

Editorial question Useful evidence What still needs judgment
Is the passage unusually dense? Reading ease, grade estimates, sentence length Whether the detail is necessary for the audience
Did a revision reduce reading burden? Scores from comparable versions Whether meaning, tone, and accuracy were preserved
Where should editing begin? Long-sentence and complex-word cues Which terms need replacing, defining, or keeping

Stable comparisons need representative English text and the same sentence-splitting and complex-word settings. Very short passages can swing sharply after one edit, and English syllable heuristics do not transfer reliably to mixed-language or non-Latin text. Treat a score as a screening signal, then read the passage for the action, sequence, tone, and knowledge it assumes.

How to Use This Tool:

Review one coherent passage at a time so its scores and revision cues describe a single audience and purpose.

  1. Paste the English passage or load one local TXT file, then choose the Reader target that matches the people expected to use the text.
  2. Choose Line-aware sentence splitting for bullets, notes, or slide copy with sparse punctuation. Keep the standard abbreviation guard for ordinary prose.
  3. Leave the default sentence and word thresholds in place unless a documented style guide requires different limits. Changing the complex-word threshold also changes the Fog and SMOG estimates.
  4. Read Current readability with the target-fit badge, then use Revision brief to inspect the sentences and words behind the headline.

Interpreting Results:

Reading ease runs in the opposite direction from grade estimates: a higher value usually means lighter surface reading. The Consensus grade is the median of five grade formulas, so one unusually high or low formula does not control the headline.

  • Fits target means the consensus grade is no more than 0.5 grades above the selected ceiling.
  • Near target means it is more than 0.5 but no more than 2 grades above that ceiling.
  • Above target means it exceeds the ceiling by more than 2 grades.
  • A formula spread above 4 grades is a warning to inspect sentence and word evidence instead of trusting one number.

A lower grade is not automatically a better revision. Confirm that the edited passage still states the correct action, keeps necessary qualifications, and makes sense to a representative reader.

Technical Details:

Readability formulas reduce a passage to counts of words, sentences, syllables, letters, and non-space characters. Their different weightings explain why the same passage can receive several grade estimates. Sentence splitting and syllable estimation therefore affect every downstream result.

Formula Core:

Let W be words, S sentences, Y estimated syllables, C words at or above the active complex-syllable threshold, L letters per 100 words, Q sentences per 100 words, and N non-space characters. The six reported formulas are:

Flesch Reading Ease=206.835−1.015×WS−84.6×YW Flesch–Kincaid Grade=0.39×WS+11.8×YW−15.59 Gunning Fog=0.4×(WS+100×CW) SMOG estimate=1.043×C×30S+3.1291 Coleman–Liau=0.0588×L−0.296×Q−15.8 Automated Readability Index=4.71×NW+0.5×WS−21.43

For a 100-word passage split into 5 sentences with 150 estimated syllables, Flesch Reading Ease is 59.6 and Flesch–Kincaid Grade is 9.9 before grade bounding. Each grade formula is bounded to 0 through 18 before the median is taken. Grade values are displayed to one decimal place; the calculations retain their unrounded values.

The selected reader target changes only the target-fit comparison, not the passage counts or equations. The grade ceilings are 6 for plain-language notices, 8 for the general public, 10 for workplace updates, 12 for technical audiences, and 14 for academic or specialist readers.

Rule Core:

Reading-ease scoreBand
90 or higherVery easy
80 to below 90Easy
70 to below 80Fairly easy
60 to below 70Plain English
50 to below 60Fairly difficult
30 to below 50Difficult
Below 30Very difficult

Standard splitting protects a short list of common abbreviations before breaking at sentence punctuation. Line-aware splitting also treats non-empty lines as sentence-like units. Words are Unicode letter, mark, or number runs with internal apostrophes and hyphens; syllables use an English vowel-group heuristic, not a pronunciation dictionary.

Sentence cues are produced when a sentence reaches the active word threshold, contains at least two complex words covering at least 25% of its words, resembles a passive construction, or contains at least two words ending in ly. The long-sentence threshold is 8 to 80 words and defaults to 20. The complex-word threshold is 2 to 6 syllables and defaults to 3; the long-word threshold is 6 to 24 letters and defaults to 10. These are editing prompts, not grammar diagnoses.

Limitations and Privacy:

English readability formulas cannot measure factual accuracy, logic, accessibility, emotional tone, specialist familiarity, or whether a reader can complete the intended task.

  • Samples below 30 words are especially unstable; samples below 100 words still deserve caution.
  • Mixed-language and non-Latin passages can produce misleading syllable and grade estimates.
  • Pasted text and local TXT files up to 2 MiB are analyzed in the browser. The passage is not placed in the share URL.

Worked Examples:

Short public notice

A 70-word notice is compared with the General public ceiling. A consensus grade of 9.4 is Near target, not a pass/fail verdict. The editor checks the longest flagged sentence, revises it, and compares the new score using the same settings.

Sparse slide bullets

Copied slide text has one idea per line but few periods. Standard splitting treats too much of it as one sentence, so the sparse-punctuation warning appears. Switching to Line-aware makes each non-empty line a sentence-like unit and gives a more useful first-pass comparison.

References: