Flesch Reading Ease Explained: How to Write for Any Audience
That readability score under your word count isn't just a number — it's a formula from 1948 that's still one of the fastest ways to check if your writing is actually easy to read.
What the score is actually measuring
The Flesch Reading Ease formula was published in 1948 by Rudolf Flesch, and it's still one of the most widely used readability tests almost eighty years later — it's built into Microsoft Word, shows up in SEO tools, and is required reading for U.S. government plain-language guidelines. What it measures, specifically, is sentence length and word length: longer sentences and longer, multi-syllable words push the score down (harder to read); short sentences with short, common words push it up (easier to read).
It's not measuring whether your writing is good, clear, or correct — a formula can't judge that. It's a proxy for one specific thing: how much effort the average reader needs to parse your sentences on a first read. That's a narrower claim than "readability" sounds like, and it's worth keeping in mind so the score doesn't get over-trusted.
How to read the number
The scale runs roughly from 0 to 100, and higher means easier to read. As a rough guide: 90-100 is very easy, around a 5th-grade reading level — think children's books. 60-70 is considered plain, standard writing, roughly what a 8th or 9th grader could follow without strain, and it's a common target for general-audience web content. Below 30 is difficult, dense, academic-style writing — think legal documents or research papers.
There's a companion number, the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, which converts the same underlying math into a U.S. school grade level instead of a 0-100 score — a score of 8.0 roughly means "an 8th grader could read this comfortably." Both numbers come from the same sentence-length and syllable-count inputs; they're just presented differently.
Practical ways to lower your score (make it easier to read)
The formula only cares about two things, so there are really only two levers: shorten your sentences, and use shorter, more common words where you can. In practice, the sentence-length lever moves the score fastest — a single 40-word sentence stuffed with three ideas will do more damage to your score than a handful of long words scattered through short sentences.
A useful editing pass: find your longest sentences first and look for a natural place to split them into two. Then look for any unnecessarily formal word choice — "utilize" instead of "use", "prior to" instead of "before" — and swap it for the plainer version. Neither change requires dumbing down your ideas, just the sentence structure carrying them.
When a lower score is actually the wrong goal
Not everything should aim for a 70. A legal disclaimer, a technical API reference, or an academic paper has its own audience and its own conventions, and forcing those into short, simple sentences can actually make them less precise or less credible to the readers they're written for. The Flesch score is most useful as a check for general-audience writing — a blog post, a product page, a help article — where the goal genuinely is "as many people as possible should understand this on the first read."
It's also just one signal, not a verdict. A passage can score well and still be unclear if it's poorly organized, or score poorly and still be perfectly fine for its intended, more technical audience. Treat it as a nudge to reconsider your longest sentences, not a grade to chase for its own sake.
Check your own writing
Open Tools Library's Word Counter calculates both the Flesch Reading Ease score and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level live as you type or paste in a draft, alongside word count, sentence count, and a keyword density breakdown for anyone checking SEO content. Nothing you paste in is uploaded anywhere — the whole thing runs in your browser.