Text Readability Tests

This website has a readability test which can be fun to use. You copy and paste a section of your text and it calculates its readability and gives scores on the Gunning Fog Index and Flesch Reading Ease.

The first estimates the years of formal education needed to understand the text on a first reading. A Fog index of 12 requires the reading level of a U.S. high school senior (around 18 years old). A paragraph from my history book measured 14.84 on this scale so it's beyond most American 18 year olds.

The Flesch measures textual difficulty which indicates how easy a text is to read, on a scale of 0 = very difficult, to 100 = very easy. My piece came out at 46.97 which seems bang in the middle.

Hours of holiday fun!