Readability score checker

Upgraded readability checker

You are welcome to try our Advanced Readability Checker, which embodies an improved version of the Flesch Grade Level Calculator. Your texts will be methodically assessed using a particular Flesch Grade Level formula.

Why is readability quintessential for any written work?

If your content is barely readable, it means you will fail to achieve the main purpose of writing it – attract your target audience. Thus, you should be focused on making your text readable, or, in other words, comprehensible.

There is one significant aspect to remember: the readability of your content should be correlated with the intellectual level of your audience. Note: a low readability score may not always refer to your text’s incomprehensibility.

Written works of higher academic levels, such as Master’s and PhD, often have low readability scores, which predominantly indicate sophisticated terminology.

However, if your audience consists of scholars, those “unfathomable terms” will be typically used in the field under investigation.

How to define a readability score?

The particularities of the Flesch reading ease test

The general readability of a text is determined by the Flesch reading ease test, which was specifically elaborated for this purpose. In order to measure the readability score of a given content effectively, two variables are applied:

After the tool completes the analysis based on the Flesch reading ease test, it generates a score between 0 and 100. If your score is from 90% to 100%, it implies your content is extremely comprehensible, even for elementary school readers. In contrast, if your score is from 0% to 10%, it implies that your content is intricate, am biguous, or intended for a narrow audience of specialists highly competent in a particular sphere.

There are also average scores, some of which are closer to the complex level of readability, and others are closer to the simple level of readability. Our table below elucidates all levels of Readability Score, which encompass Adult Reading Level, Comments, and Suggestions.

History of The Flesch Reading Ease Test

Rudolph Flesch, who worked for the Associated Press as a quality consultant, attempted to come up with a special technique to make each newspaper article more readable, in accordance with the demands of each target audience. This way, he invented The Flesch Reading Ease test in the 1940s. The readability test provided by Flesch appeared to be a ground-breaking invention. It greatly improved the quality not only of the Associated Press articles, but also influenced the creation of similar readability scores to check all the written texts possible. However, the initial formula was quite difficult to use by ordinary reporters and writers. Hence, when thirty years passed after the Flesch presented his idea, Peter Kincaid along with his Navy researchers’ team took up the formula and facilitated its implementation. From that moment on, the general name of this readability test became The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score.

Basic Framework of the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Score

The calculation of the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score interrelates the scanned test with a grade level equal to the one of the United States. However, unlike the Flesch-Kincaid score, which makes a score of 8.4 equal to the comprehension of an average 8th grade student, our readability tool discerns 61-70% as the typical score for students of this academic level.

Anyway, the Flesch-Kincaid formula is applied to versatile readability checkers despite their possible discrepant and uniquely programmed features.

If we think about a simple fact: a good writer is a good reader, then we can also easily assume that being a decent writer means knowing your audience well. Having evaluated the target readers of your potential text, you can start the actual writing process. This task is simpler if your content is suitable for a wide audience.

For instance, every literate adult person can have a relatively equal comprehension of such topics as fashion, tourism, ecology, time management, business coaching, motherhood, gender diversity, etc. Still, you may also use some applicable complex terms from time to time, which will influence your general readability score. The most essential aspect to remember: a low readability score does not always indicate that your text was written ambiguously. However, if you do not produce a sophisticated scientific work, a low readability score may point to overcomplication in specific sentences. For instance, an ordinary article for a blog, which discloses an abundance of highfalutin sentences will look inappropriate. However, it would be strange to simplify idiosyncratic scholarly language only for the sake of getting a medium to high Readability score. Thus, only an individual case shows whether it is beneficial to get a lower score or to get a higher score.