◫Readability Score

A readability score cannot tell you whether your writing is any good. It counts two things — how long your sentences are and how many syllables your words have — and turns them into a number. Structure, accuracy, whether the argument holds together: none of it is visible to the formula. Text can score 80 and still be unreadable nonsense.

What it is genuinely useful for is catching drift. You know the passage you rewrote four times and it still reads heavily. Paste it here and the sentence-length figure usually explains why.

Reading the two scores

Flesch Reading Ease runs 0 to 100 and higher is easier. Around 60 to 70 is ordinary prose that most adults read without effort. Below 30 is dense academic or technical writing — which is sometimes exactly right, because a term of art is clearer than a vague paraphrase of it.

Flesch-Kincaid converts the same measurement into a US school grade, so 8 means roughly what a thirteen-year-old could follow. For most business writing that is a reasonable target.

The two numbers underneath

Words per sentence and syllables per word are where the score actually comes from, and they are more actionable than the score itself. If your reading ease is low, one of those two is the reason, and sentence length is much easier to fix than vocabulary.

Be careful about over-correcting. Prose written purely to satisfy a formula reads like it — every sentence the same length, every word chosen for brevity rather than precision. Rhythm matters, and a long sentence surrounded by short ones is a tool, not a defect.

Syllables are counted with a heuristic rather than a dictionary, so treat the figures as close enough to compare two drafts and not precise enough to quote in a report. Both formulas assume English and will produce meaningless output for anything else.