What is a good readability score?
Readability formulas boil your writing down to two numbers: how long your sentences are and how long your words are. Here's what the scores mean, what to aim for, and — more usefully — what to do when yours is too low.
How the Flesch scores work
Flesch Reading Ease scores text from roughly 0 to 100 — higher is easier. It rewards short sentences and short words, and nothing else: 206.835 − 1.015 × (words per sentence) − 84.6 × (syllables per word). Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level repackages the same two inputs as a US school grade, so "grade 8" means an average eighth-grader could follow it on first reading. Because both formulas only see sentence length and word length, they are a proxy for clarity, not a measurement of it — a short, confusing sentence scores beautifully. Treat the score as a smoke alarm: a bad score almost always means hard reading, but a good score doesn't make the writing good.
What to aim for, by audience
Most professional writing for a general audience lands well at 60–70 Reading Ease (grade 8–9): newspapers, marketing pages, help docs. Popular fiction and mass-market email often run 70–90. Specialist writing legitimately scores lower — legal contracts, medical papers and academic prose typically fall below 40, and forcing them to 70 would strip necessary precision. The honest rule: write at the lowest grade that preserves your meaning. Nobody has ever complained that a text was too easy to understand, but readers abandon pages that make them work for no reason.
How to raise a low score (without dumbing it down)
The formula gives you exactly two levers. First, sentence length: split anything over ~25 words, cut throat-clearing openers ("It is important to note that…"), and turn comma chains into separate sentences. Second, word length: prefer "use" to "utilize", "help" to "facilitate", "end" to "terminate" — the short word is almost always the stronger one anyway. Beyond the formula's sight: front-load the point of each paragraph, use concrete examples, and read it aloud — anywhere you stumble, your reader will too.
Flesch Reading Ease bands
| 90–100 | Very easy — 5th grade; simple fiction, children's writing |
| 80–90 | Easy — 6th grade; conversational email, mass-market copy |
| 70–80 | Fairly easy — 7th grade; most popular fiction |
| 60–70 | Plain English — 8th–9th grade; news, marketing, help docs |
| 50–60 | Fairly difficult — high school; trade publications |
| 30–50 | Difficult — college; academic and technical writing |
| 0–30 | Very difficult — graduate; legal, scientific papers |
Is a readability score of 60 good?
For a general audience, yes — 60–70 Reading Ease is the plain-English band that most news and marketing writing targets. For specialist readers a lower score can be perfectly appropriate.
What grade level should I write for?
Grade 8–9 is the usual target for the general public. Write at the lowest grade level that preserves your meaning — easy reading never costs you expert readers, but hard reading costs you everyone else.
Do search engines rank easier text higher?
Not directly — Google has said readability scores are not a ranking factor. Indirectly it can matter: clearer pages tend to hold readers longer and earn more links, and those signals do matter.