Readability Inspector
"Six formulas, one clear picture of how your writing reads."
Paste any passage to instantly score it against six industry-standard readability formulas — Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, Gunning Fog, SMOG, Coleman-Liau, and the Automated Readability Index. Everything runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded.
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Understanding Your Readability Scores
Why Six Formulas Instead of One
Every readability formula weighs sentence length and word complexity slightly differently, so no single number tells the whole story. Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid are calibrated for general text, Gunning Fog and SMOG were built with technical and health writing in mind, and Coleman-Liau and ARI skip syllables entirely in favor of raw character counts. Viewing all six side by side gives a far more reliable picture than trusting one score alone.
Syllable Counting Is an Approximation
Syllables are estimated from spelling patterns using a standard, industry-accepted heuristic — the same technique used by most readability software, since true phonetic syllable data isn't available client-side. This is highly reliable for the vast majority of English words, with rare off-by-one results on words like idea or create, where two vowels are pronounced in separate syllables (a pattern known as vowel hiatus).
What the Grade-Level Scores Mean
Flesch-Kincaid, Gunning Fog, SMOG, Coleman-Liau and ARI all express results as a US school grade level. A score of 8 roughly means an eighth grader could read the passage comfortably. Most news writing sits around grade 8–10; academic and legal writing often lands at grade 14 or higher.
Who Uses This
- Teachers checking whether reading material matches their students' grade level.
- Writers and editors simplifying copy for a general audience.
- Students revising essays to hit a target readability range.
- Technical writers double-checking documentation isn't unnecessarily dense.
Tips for Improving a Score
Shortening sentences is almost always the fastest way to lower every score at once, since sentence length appears in all six formulas. After that, swapping long or unfamiliar words for shorter, more common ones has the next biggest effect.
Nothing Is Saved or Uploaded
All analysis happens entirely in your browser using JavaScript. Refreshing the page clears your text completely — nothing is sent to a server or stored anywhere.