What Readability Score Should You Aim For?

Writstack Guides  ·  Last updated July 26, 2026

Ask ten writers what readability score to aim for and you'll get ten confident, contradictory answers. The truth is simpler than most of them make it: there's a well-established target range for web content, clear reasons behind it, and a short list of situations where you should ignore it.

This guide explains what the scores actually measure, what to aim for by content type, and how to improve a low score without dumbing your writing down.

What the Flesch Reading Ease score measures

The Flesch Reading Ease formula has been around since 1948, and it measures exactly two things: average sentence length and average syllables per word. That's it. It doesn't evaluate logic, accuracy, structure, or whether your writing is any good. It measures mechanical friction — how much work a reader's brain does to decode each sentence.

Scores run from 0 to 100, higher meaning easier:

• 90–100: Very easy. Short sentences, simple words. Comics, basic instructions.
• 70–90: Easy to fairly easy. Consumer content, popular fiction.
• 60–70: Plain English. The standard target for web content.
• 30–60: Difficult. Academic writing, dense professional prose.
• 0–30: Very difficult. Legal contracts, scientific papers.

The companion metric, the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, translates the same math into US school grades. A grade level of 8 means a typical eighth grader could read it comfortably.

The target: Grade 6 to 8, score 60 to 80

For blog posts, marketing pages, and most web content, aim for a Flesch score between 60 and 80, which corresponds to roughly a Grade 6 to 8 reading level.

Here's the part people resist: this is not about writing for uneducated readers. The most-read publications in the English language — major newspapers, the BBC, bestselling nonfiction — deliberately write at Grade 8 or below. They do it because reading effort is a tax, and every reader, including the highly educated ones, prefers paying less of it.

Your reader is scanning on a phone, half-distracted, deciding every few seconds whether to keep going. A Grade 12 sentence doesn't make you sound smarter to that person. It makes them leave.

When to ignore the target

Three legitimate exceptions:

• Technical documentation for experts. "Instantiate the class" is the correct phrase for developers. Simplifying jargon your audience uses daily adds friction rather than removing it.
• Academic and legal writing. The conventions exist for precision. Fighting them costs more than it gains.
• Necessary terminology. If your article is about photosynthesis, the word "photosynthesis" stays, and your syllable count takes the hit. Never swap a precise term for a vague short one just to move a score.

Why readability matters for SEO

Google has never confirmed readability scores as a direct ranking factor, and they almost certainly aren't one. But readability drives the behavioral signals that do matter. Hard-to-read pages get abandoned faster, and when a searcher bounces back to the results and clicks a competitor, that pattern — repeated across visitors — tells Google your page didn't satisfy the query.

Readable content also earns more of everything that compounds: shares, links, return visits, newsletter signups. The score is a proxy for whether people actually finish what you wrote.

How to raise a low score without dumbing it down

Since the formula only measures sentence length and word length, you only have two levers — but they're powerful ones.

1. Break up long sentences

Any sentence over 25 words is a candidate. Look for "and," "which," and "however" holding two thoughts together and give each thought its own sentence. This single habit fixes most bad scores, because sentence length is where most writers accumulate friction without noticing.

2. Swap inflated words for plain ones

Utilize becomes use. Approximately becomes about. Facilitate becomes help. Implement becomes do or build. None of these swaps lose meaning — the longer versions were never adding any. They're the verbal equivalent of a suit jacket worn to sound important.

3. Cut passive voice while you're at it

Passive constructions run longer than active ones and bury the actor. "The report was reviewed by the team" is eight words; "the team reviewed the report" is five, and it's clearer. Passive voice isn't measured by the Flesch formula directly, but fixing it shortens sentences, which is.

4. Read it out loud

Anywhere you stumble or run out of breath, the reader struggles too. This catches problems no formula can see — awkward rhythm, buried points, sentences that are technically short but still confusing.

The practical workflow

Don't check readability while drafting — it makes you self-conscious and slows you down. Write the full draft, then run it through a checker, then fix the flagged problems in one editing pass. Score first, edit second, publish third. The whole check adds five minutes and routinely rescues content that would otherwise lose half its readers by the third paragraph.

Three readability myths worth killing

Myth 1: Simple writing sounds unprofessional

The reverse is closer to true. Inflated vocabulary is what inexperienced writers use to signal competence; genuinely senior writers compress. Warren Buffett's shareholder letters — read by the most sophisticated financial audience on earth — score in the plain-English range on purpose. He's said explicitly that he writes as if explaining to his sisters: smart people who don't share his jargon. Clarity reads as confidence. Complexity reads as hiding something.

Myth 2: A good score means good writing

A page of short, simple, disorganized sentences can score 85 and still be unreadable in every way that matters. The formula can't see whether your argument makes sense, whether paragraphs flow, or whether you buried the point in paragraph nine. Treat the score as a floor, not a grade. It catches mechanical friction; it says nothing about substance. You still need structure, and you still need something worth saying.

Myth 3: The target is the same for every audience

Grade 6–8 is the target for general web content because general web audiences are diverse, distracted, and reading on phones. A newsletter for tax attorneys, an API changelog for developers, a research summary for clinicians — these can and should run harder, because their readers share vocabulary that makes "complex" words the clearest ones available. Know the range for your audience, then hold yourself to it.

How sentence length actually drives the score

Because sentence length is the lever with the most travel, it's worth seeing the math. In the Flesch formula, average sentence length is multiplied by roughly 1.0 while syllables-per-word is multiplied by nearly 85 — but syllables per word only vary within a narrow band (about 1.3 to 1.8 in normal English), while sentence length swings from 8 to 40 words. In practice, that means chopping a 34-word sentence into two 17-word sentences moves your score more than any vocabulary swap you can make in the same sentence.

A useful rule of thumb: vary your sentence lengths, but keep the average under 20. A rhythm of short, medium, short, long reads far better than uniform medium-length sentences — and it scores nearly the same. Readability and rhythm aren't in tension; monotony is a separate sin the formula happens not to measure.

One last practical note: dialogue, lists, and subheadings all pull your effective difficulty down without touching a single sentence, because they break the visual wall of text. If your score is fine but the page still feels heavy, the fix is usually structure — more headings, shorter paragraphs, a list where you currently have a comma pile-up — not simpler words.