Readability Scorer

No single readability formula is “the right one” — they measure different proxies. Flesch and Flesch–Kincaid lean on syllables per word, so they punish long words; Coleman–Liau and ARI count characters instead, which makes them immune to syllable-counting quirks but blind to genuinely hard vocabulary; Gunning Fog counts “complex” words with exclusions for proper nouns and inflections; SMOG was built for health materials and insists on a 30-sentence sample; Dale–Chall is the only one that asks whether the specific words are familiar, not just short. When all seven roughly agree, trust the composite. When they diverge sharply, that divergence is itself the finding — usually long words in short sentences, or the reverse.

The web has a strong empirical answer to “what should I aim for”: Flesch Reading Ease of 60+ and a grade level of 8–9 for general audiences. That is not dumbing down — it's respecting that people read screens in a hurry, in bad light, in their second language. Technical audiences tolerate grade 10–12 comfortably, but nobody has ever complained that expert content was too easy to read. The fastest levers are mechanical: split any sentence over 25 words, replace three-syllable words where a shorter one carries the same meaning, and break paragraph walls.

Be skeptical of tools that hide the math. Syllable counting is where most readability checkers silently disagree — this one uses vowel-group counting with silent-e, -le and hiatus rules plus an exception dictionary, and the same text always yields the same counts. The formulas are printed next to their scores, so you can verify any number by hand. That determinism matters when readability targets are part of a style guide or contract: a score you can reproduce is a score you can enforce.

Readability is one leg of content quality. Check the topical side — density, placement, phrase repetition — in the Keyword & N-Gram Analyzer, run the whole page through the 85-check SEO audit (it embeds this exact readability engine), and preview how your polished title renders in the SERP preview.