Draftcamp

Readability checker

Flesch score, grade level, and the exact sentences slowing your reader down

Runs entirely in your browser - your text is never uploaded

Nothing leaves your browser

Paste a draft to score it

You will get a Flesch score, a grade level, and the specific sentences that are hardest to read - not just a number.

What the Flesch score measures

Flesch Reading Ease has exactly two inputs: how long your sentences are, and how many syllables your words have. That is the whole formula.

206.835 - 1.015 x (words / sentences) - 84.6 x (syllables / words)

Which means it is blind to almost everything else. It cannot tell whether your argument holds, whether the structure makes sense, or whether the words are the right ones. A page of confident nonsense in short sentences scores beautifully. Treat the score as a smoke alarm, not an editor.

The bands

  • 90-100 - very easy, 5th grade
  • 60-70 - standard, 8th to 9th grade. Where most web content should sit.
  • 30-50 - difficult, college level. Normal for technical and B2B writing.
  • 0-30 - very difficult. Legal and academic prose lives here.

Why it matters more now than it did

Answer engines quote sentences. When ChatGPT or an AI Overview cites a page, it lifts a clean, self-contained statement out of it. A 40-word sentence with three subordinate clauses does not survive that extraction - there is no clean piece to take. Short, declarative sentences are quotable, and being quotable is now a distribution channel.

That is the same principle the rest of these tools measure from a different angle.

Common questions

What is a good Flesch Reading Ease score?
For general web content, 60 to 70 - roughly 8th to 9th grade. Technical and B2B writing usually lands between 40 and 55 and that is fine; forcing a specialist page to 70 means removing the specialist vocabulary your reader came for. Match the score to the audience, not to a target.
Why does my score change when I add a heading?
Flesch divides words by sentences, and a heading with no full stop reads as one long sentence. Paste body prose rather than a full page dump if you want a number that reflects how the text actually reads.
Does readability affect SEO rankings?
Not directly. There is no readability factor in Google ranking systems. It affects the things that do matter: time on page, scroll depth, and whether an answer engine can extract a clean statement to quote. Dense prose is harder to excerpt.
Why are passive sentences only flagged as hints?
Because detecting passive voice properly needs a grammatical parser, and pattern matching gets it wrong often enough that presenting it as a verdict would be dishonest. The flagged sentences are worth a look; they are not necessarily wrong. Passive voice is also correct in plenty of contexts.
Does this work for languages other than English?
No. Flesch was derived from English prose and the syllable counting is English orthography. Running it on German or Japanese returns a number, but not a meaningful one, so results are suppressed for short or non-English samples.