Readability Checker — Flesch Scores & Reading Time
Paste your draft and get its Flesch Reading Ease score, Flesch-Kincaid grade level, estimated reading time (default 238 words per minute, adjustable), and the sentence-length and syllable stats behind the numbers — so you can see not just the score but what is driving it.
Scores
Paste text with at least one full sentence to score it.
Design the finished piece in Moda
Once the copy reads well, lay it out as a one-pager, blog graphic, or slide in Moda.
Try Moda free →What the two Flesch scores mean
Both formulas use only two ingredients: average sentence length and average syllables per word. Flesch Reading Ease runs 0–100, higher is easier — 60–70 is plain English a 13-year-old follows comfortably, 90+ is very easy, below 30 is academic prose. Flesch-Kincaid grade maps the same ingredients onto US school grades: 8.2 means a typical eighth-grader can follow it. Most consumer copy aims for grade 6–8; newspapers average around grade 10. The two scores always move together because they measure the same thing on different scales.
The syllable count is an estimate — by design
English spelling does not encode syllables, so this tool uses the standard heuristic: count vowel groups, drop silent trailing e ("make" is one syllable, but "table" keeps its -le), and handle -ed endings ("walked" one syllable, "wanted" two). It is right for the overwhelming majority of words and wrong for some ("poem", "chaos"), which is why scores here can differ by a point or two from tools built on pronunciation dictionaries. Every rule-based checker has this property; compare drafts against each other on the same tool rather than chasing agreement between tools.
What the scores cannot tell you
Readability formulas count structure, not meaning. Short sentences of jargon score beautifully; "The mitochondria run the cell" grades easier than "It was a dark and stormy night" wants you to believe the formula can be gamed by chopping sentences in half — and it can, at the cost of flow. Use the score as a smoke alarm for over-long sentences and polysyllabic pileups, then read the text aloud; no formula measures whether the words are the right ones.
How reading time is calculated
Reading time divides the word count by your words-per-minute rate. The 238 wpm default is the meta-analysis average for adults reading silently in English; skimming runs far faster, technical reading far slower, and reading aloud sits near 150–160 wpm. If you are timing a talk or voiceover script, set the rate to your actual speaking pace — 130–150 wpm is a comfortable presentation speed.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good Flesch Reading Ease score?
For general audiences, 60–70. Marketing copy often aims higher (70–80); legal and academic writing commonly lands below 40. The right target depends on the reader — an expert audience tolerates a lower score without difficulty.
Why does this score differ from Word or Hemingway?
Different syllable estimators and different sentence-splitting rules. All rule-based checkers approximate; gaps of a few points are normal. Track your revisions on one tool and the direction of movement is trustworthy even where the absolute number is soft.
How do I lower my grade level?
The formula only sees two levers: shorten sentences and prefer shorter words. Splitting every sentence over ~25 words usually moves the grade more than word swaps do. Check the average-words-per-sentence stat to see which lever your text needs.
Do headings and bullet fragments skew the score?
Somewhat — fragments without terminal punctuation merge into neighboring sentences and can inflate sentence length. For the cleanest score, paste body prose only.
Does the checker work for languages other than English?
The Flesch formulas were calibrated on English; the syllable heuristic assumes English spelling. Other languages need recalibrated variants (like Flesch-Vacca for Italian), so scores on non-English text are not meaningful here.