Readability checker that explains itself
Most checkers give you a score. This one shows you which sentences are hard to read, and why — in plain language.
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- Words
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- Sentences
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- Avg. sentence length
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Your text, annotated
Needs attention Worth a look — select a highlight for details.
Findings
What a Flesch score is actually made of
Flesch Reading Ease is not a black box. It is exactly 206.835 − 1.015 × (words per sentence) − 84.6 × (syllables per word) — two inputs and nothing else. Which means any change in the score above splits, with no remainder, into "your sentences got shorter" and "your words got shorter."
We used that to measure what real simplification is made of, across 1,398 pairs of English and Simple English Wikipedia articles on the same subjects. The Simple English rewrites score11.0 Flesch points easier — and only 41% of that came from shorter sentences. The larger share, 59%, came from shorter words: 1.59 syllables per word down to 1.51, which sounds like rounding error and is worth 6.5 points.
Writing advice, ours included, spends most of its attention on sentence length because it is the easier thing to count. If your score is not moving, the vocabulary is the more likely place to look. See what simplification is made of.