Readability checker
100% private — runs in your browserRun a check to score your draft.
Long sentences found
- Nothing computed yet. Sentences of 29 or more words will be listed here with their word counts.
Highlighted preview
What the Flesch score actually measures
The Flesch Reading Ease formula takes two things into account: how long your sentences are and how many syllables your words carry. It produces a number from 0 to about 100, where higher means easier. The standard interpretation bands look like this:
| Score | Standard label | Typical reading level |
|---|---|---|
| 90–100 | Very easy | Around 5th grade |
| 80–89 | Easy | Around 6th grade |
| 70–79 | Fairly easy | Around 7th grade |
| 60–69 | Plain English | 8th–9th grade |
| 50–59 | Fairly difficult | 10th–12th grade |
| 30–49 | Difficult | College |
| 0–29 | Very difficult | Graduate |
The meter in the tool colours your score with those bands: teal for the readable zones, amber for the middle, coral when a draft is dense enough that a tired grader will reread sentences. Watch the meter move as you edit — it is the fastest feedback loop you can get on clarity.
Academic does not mean complicated
A low Flesch score is not automatically bad. Academic writing handles dense ideas, so scores between roughly 30 and 60 are common for scholarly prose, and nobody expects a case study analysis to read like a children's book. The score becomes useful when it drops into the teens or single digits — that range usually signals problems the reader feels immediately: sentences stacked three clauses deep, nominalisations ("the implementation of the optimization") where plain verbs would do, and words chosen for length rather than precision.
The practical target is not a number; it is a rate of friction. Ask yourself where a reader stumbles. That is why the long-sentence list matters more than the headline score: a draft averaging 22 words per sentence with two 40-word monsters reads worse than a steady draft with none. Fix the monsters first, then look at the average. If your draft runs long everywhere, the word counter shows the average sentence length live as you type.
The Gunning Fog index in plain terms
The Gunning Fog index estimates the years of schooling a reader needs to get through a text on the first pass. It combines average sentence length with the share of "complex" words — those of three or more syllables. A fog index of 12 roughly corresponds to a US high-school senior; most university writing lands somewhere in the teens.
Treat the fog number as a relative gauge rather than an absolute truth. It counts syllables, so it cannot tell "administration" (necessary jargon) from "utilisation" (padding), and legal or medical terms will inflate it no matter how clear the writing is. Use it to compare drafts: if your revision drops the fog index by several points without losing meaning, the revision genuinely got clearer. If it barely moves, the problem is probably sentence structure, not vocabulary.
How to shorten a long sentence (worked rewrite)
Below is an illustrative rewrite of the kind this tool flags. The "before" sentence runs 38 words and buries its point; the "after" version says the same thing in 16 words across three sentences.
Before (38 words): The organization implemented a series of operational adjustments across multiple departments in order to facilitate the optimization of resource allocation processes as well as to improve overall efficiency during the preceding fiscal period.
After (16 words): The organization restructured several departments last year. The changes sped up resource allocation. Overall efficiency improved.
Three moves did the work. First, the noun chains were unwound — "the optimization of resource allocation processes" became "resource allocation" with a real verb, "sped up". Second, the sentence was split at its natural joints, which the dashes and "as well as" were hiding. Third, the time marker moved to a short sentence of its own. You can apply the same three moves to any sentence on your list: find the verbs, split at the connectors, and let each idea own its sentence. If the split feels choppy, join two of the short sentences with "because" or "so" — those carry logic without dragging length along.
A five-minute readability workflow
Before submitting, paste your draft section by section rather than all at once — averages hide the worst paragraph. Start with the introduction and the conclusion, since graders read those closest. Run the check, then work top down: split the flagged long sentences, swap the three heaviest nominalisations for verbs, and re-run. Two passes are usually enough. The goal at the end is a score you can defend, not a perfect one — a marketing case study with quoted financials will never score like a blog post, and it should not.
Deadline too tight for a second draft?
When there is no time to polish sentence by sentence, hand the brief to a professional writer. Topic, length, referencing style and deadline are enough to get a quoted price — and a clean draft back before it is due.
Frequently asked questions
What Flesch score should academic writing aim for?
There is no fixed pass mark. Scholarly prose commonly sits somewhere between 30 and 60 because it handles technical vocabulary and layered arguments. Aim instead for a score you can defend: if it is low, be able to point at necessary jargon rather than padding, and make sure no single sentence forces a reread.
What counts as a "long sentence" in this tool?
The checker flags any sentence of 29 words or more. That threshold is a working convention from readability practice: past roughly 28 words, sentences usually carry more than one idea, and readers start losing the thread. The list exists so you can judge each one — some long sentences are fine, especially those joined by "because" or "so".
Is the Gunning Fog index the same as grade level?
They are related but not identical. The grade-level figure shown in the tool comes from the Flesch–Kincaid formula, while the Gunning Fog index is a separate estimate built on sentence length plus the share of three-syllable-plus words. When they disagree, trust the pattern across several checks rather than either single number.
Does a low readability score mean bad writing?
No. The formula only sees sentence length and syllables. A precise legal definition or a quoted financial term will drag the score down while improving the writing. Use the score to find friction — stacked clauses, inflated nouns, sentences that never end — not as a grade for your prose.
Can I check one paragraph at a time?
Yes, and it works better that way. The formulas are per-sentence, so any amount of text scores correctly. Checking section by section surfaces the weak paragraph that a whole-document average would dilute, and the highlighted preview still shows exactly where each long sentence sits.
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