Flesch Reading Ease (EN)

An editor asked for reading ease above 60 and you have no idea where your draft sits. Or a client wants plain language in a training handout and somebody will measure it later. Flesch Reading Ease is the oldest and most quoted ruler for that job: the higher the score, the easier the text reads. Paste the text and the number appears with the band it falls into.

The formula is 206.835 minus 1.015 times words per sentence, minus 84.6 times syllables per word. A sentence is any run of periods, question marks or exclamation marks; a syllable is any run of vowels, with y counted as a vowel. That shortcut ignores silent e, so make and time count as two syllables instead of one and the score lands a bit low. Abbreviations with periods do the opposite, inflating sentences and lifting the score.

Use at least a hundred words. The sample sentence in the box scores 102.0, which only tells you it is short. The ruler was built for English: pasting Portuguese returns a number that means nothing, because syllables per word behave differently. A high score is not the same as a good text either, since the formula sees only sentence length and word length. It runs in your browser.