How easy is your writing to read?

The score comes from two things only: how many words a sentence has on average, and how many syllables a word has. Short sentences and short words score high; long sentences full of long words score low.

This checker labels 60 and above Easy to read, 50 to 59 Fairly hard and below 50 Hard to read. Most pages that sell to the public should sit in the first band.

The checker uses the Flesch–Kincaid grade: 0.39 × average words per sentence, plus 11.8 × average syllables per word, minus 15.59. The result is a US school grade, and adding five turns it into a UK reading age, never reported below 7.

The reading ease score uses the same two counts the other way round: 206.835, minus 1.015 × words per sentence, minus 84.6 × syllables per word. Both need at least 10 words, so a single short line gets no score.

Syllables are counted by a vowel rule, as most checkers do, so the odd word will be miscounted. Over a full page those errors even out.

Shorten the sentences first; it moves the score more than anything else. Then swap long words for everyday ones, and put the person doing the action at the front of the sentence.

Take this: "In order to facilitate the seamless delivery of innovative solutions, our organisation utilises a holistic methodology that is continuously refined by our experienced team of dedicated professionals. All enquiries are responded to within a timeframe of two working days." The checker scores it 0, Hard to read, with a reading age of 23.

Rewritten as "We plan each job with you, then do the work. Our team checks it at the end and tells you what we found. We answer every enquiry within two working days." it scores 93 with a reading age of 8, and it says more.

• Keep most sentences under 20 words, and split any over 25.
• One idea per sentence, one topic per paragraph.
• Write "we" and "you", and say who does what.
• Use the words your customers use, not industry terms.
• Cut filler such as "in order to", "very" and "solutions".
• Use headings and short lists so skimmers find their part.

Google does not rank pages by a readability score. Plain writing helps in a less direct way: people who understand a page stay on it, find what they came for and get in touch.

AI assistants work sentence by sentence too. A short, self-contained sentence that answers one question is easy for ChatGPT or Google's AI Overviews to quote; an answer spread across a long paragraph is harder to lift out.

Plain writing also helps accessibility. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines include a reading level criterion at their highest level (AAA), which asks for a simpler version when text needs more than lower secondary education to follow.