Readability Score

Readability Score runs six established formulas over whatever you paste: Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch–Kincaid Grade, Gunning Fog, SMOG, Coleman–Liau and the Automated Readability Index. Each is a row carrying its number and a plain label — Flesch as a band running from very easy to professional, the other five as a US school grade, with anything past twelfth grade shown as university or postgraduate level. That six-row table, plus a one-line Flesch verdict under the output box, is the whole of what the page prints.

Every one of those formulas is arithmetic on two inputs: how long your sentences run, and how many syllables your words carry. None of them reads. Split a sentence at the nearest comma and the score improves; write fluent nonsense in words of one syllable and it scores well. The reverse holds too — churn, tranche and basis risk are short, easy to count and opaque to anyone outside the trade, while understanding is four syllables and troubles nobody. Take the number as a smoke alarm, not a verdict on the writing.

The syllable count is a heuristic rather than a dictionary lookup. It counts vowel groups with a short list of hand-coded exceptions, which holds up on ordinary English prose and goes wrong on surnames, acronyms and invented product names. The rule is English-only, so text in another language yields numbers that look real and mean nothing. Gunning Fog's complex-word tally deliberately skips hyphenated compounds, proper nouns spotted mid-sentence, and common -ed, -es and -ing endings on short stems, because otherwise every mention of wondering or Manchester would inflate the index.

The scoring runs inside this tab and nowhere else, with no upload at any point, which is what makes the tool usable on an unpublished draft, a client's manuscript or an internal policy that is not meant to travel. Beneath the score table sit the raw counts the formulas are built from — words, sentences, average words per sentence, average syllables per word and the number of complex words — followed by the sentences that ran over your length threshold, longest first and each trimmed to about 120 characters. In practice that list is the most useful part of the output: a score tells you the prose is heavy, the list tells you which sentences made it so.

The two controls are still described here because they exist and are wired into the calculation, not because they change anything you can see. If you need the sentence lengths themselves, Word Counter reports words and sentences, and reading a draft aloud finds the long sentences faster than any threshold does.

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