Readability Checker
Paste or type your text to see five established readability measures, with the counts behind them. Readability formulas estimate how hard text is to read from sentence and word length; they don't measure writing quality. Your text never leaves your browser.
Results update as you type. Scores are most meaningful for at least 100 words.
Readability measures
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What should I do next?
You have read your text's readability. Now look at its structure.
Sentence Counter
Counts sentences and shows how many words each has, with the average, shortest and longest.
Paragraph Counter
Counts paragraphs and shows how many words each has, with the average, shortest and longest.
Readability in Academic Writing
What readability formulas measure, how Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid, Gunning Fog, SMOG and the Automated Readability Index are calculated, why they disagree, and why a readability score is not a measure of writing quality.
How to structure an academic essay
How to build an academic essay around an argument: analysing the question, writing a thesis statement, planning the body, writing introductions and conclusions, common structures for different essay types, and a worked plan.
How the checker counts
- Words and sentences are counted exactly as in the Word Counter and the Sentence Counter, so the same text gives the same counts in every ResearchKit writing tool.
- Syllables are counted with a spelling-based rule: each group of vowels is a syllable, corrected for common patterns such as a silent final e. It is right for most common academic words, not for every word. Numbers and web or email addresses count as one syllable.
- A complex word (Gunning Fog) and a polysyllable (SMOG) are both words of 3 or more syllables.
- Characters for the Automated Readability Index are letters, numbers, symbols and punctuation, not spaces, counted as the Character Counter counts them.
- Scores are rounded to one decimal place. Texts under 100 words are scored but flagged, because the formulas were built on longer samples; SMOG isn't shown under 30 sentences.
What the scores can't tell you
- Whether your writing is good. The formulas count sentence and word length; they can't see meaning, organization, accuracy or argument.
- Who your readers are. A score that is too hard for the general public may suit specialists in your field.
- Words that are long but familiar to your readers, such as technical terms, which the formulas treat as difficult.
- Text in languages other than English. The formulas and the syllable rule are English-specific.
Reading the scores
- These are indicators of how hard text is to read, not measures of academic writing quality. Academic text often scores as difficult because its subject requires precise, technical language.
- The formulas often disagree by a grade or more, because each weighs sentence length and word length differently. Look at where they agree, and at the counts behind them, rather than at any single score.
- No score is right or wrong in itself. A higher Flesch Reading Ease score isn't automatically better, and a lower one isn't automatically bad; what matters is whether the text suits its readers.
Privacy
Your text is analysed entirely in your browser. It is never sent to ResearchKit or anyone else, and it isn't stored: closing or reloading the page clears it.