Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level

You finish a draft and the doubt shows up: is this too heavy for the people who will actually read it? Flesch-Kincaid Grade turns that hunch into a number. Paste your text in the box and the score updates as you type, with no button to press. A score of 8 means roughly US eighth grade, 12 is a high school senior, and anything past 16 reads like a college paper. Lower means more people get it on the first pass.

The formula has exactly two levers: 0.39 times words per sentence, plus 11.8 times syllables per word, minus 15.59. Long sentences and long words push the score up, and nothing else counts. Sentence detection looks for periods, question marks and exclamation points, so a price written as 3.5 or an abbreviation like Dr. registers as a sentence break, while a paragraph pasted without final punctuation counts as one giant sentence and inflates the result.

Syllable counting here is a vowel-group heuristic, not a dictionary, so silent letters throw it off: cake and made each register as two syllables, while an accented word like cafe registers as one. Use the score to compare two drafts of the same text rather than as an absolute grade. Very short sentences can push the result below zero, which is expected behavior. Everything is computed in your browser and the text never leaves the page.