Readability Checker

Will readers get it the first time?

A blog post, a page about your services, instructions for your customers: you want the meaning to land without anyone reading a sentence twice. Writers are poor judges of their own difficulty, because they already know what they meant. Jood's readability checker gives you a score from 0 to 100. The higher the score, the easier the text.

How to use it

1. Paste the whole text, ideally a paragraph or more rather than a single sentence.
2. Click "Start Now".
3. Read the score and the level, along with the number of words, sentences and syllables.

What the score measures

For English, the tool uses the Flesch Reading Ease formula, which combines the average sentence length with the average number of syllables per word. Syllables are estimated from groups of vowels, so a few words will be counted slightly off, but over a paragraph the errors even out.

As a rough guide, 60 to 70 is plain English that most adults read comfortably, above 80 is very easy, and below 30 is the territory of academic papers and legal contracts. The level shown next to the score is expressed as a US school grade.

The score measures form, not meaning. A short sentence made of simple words can still be unclear, and the formula cannot tell. Use it to compare two versions of the same text rather than as a final verdict.

How to raise your score

• Shorten your sentences: this moves the score more than anything else.
• Prefer short words: "use" instead of "utilize", "help" instead of "facilitate".
• Break up long paragraphs: they are harder to follow on a phone screen.

To check the length and reading time of your text, use the word counter. Your text is sent to Jood's server for the calculation and is not stored.