Readability Checker

For blogs, marketing, and product copy: Flesch ease 60–70, grade 7–9 — the range most major publications land in. Technical documentation runs harder by necessity. The target isn't dumbing down; it's removing friction so the ideas, not the sentences, do the work.

All three are built from two measurements: average sentence length and word complexity. Flesch formulas count syllables per word; Gunning Fog counts the percentage of 3+-syllable words. Long sentences full of long words score hard on all of them — which is also an accurate description of why such prose is tiring.

Check average words per sentence first: above ~22, splitting your longest sentences is the biggest single win. If sentences are fine, it's vocabulary — swap three-syllable words for shorter ones where meaning survives (utilize → use, approximately → about). The tool's advice line tells you which case you're in.

It's a heuristic (vowel-group counting with silent-e handling), correct for the vast majority of English words but fooled occasionally by exotic ones. Scores are best treated as ±2 — precise enough to compare drafts and catch problems, not a laboratory instrument.