Blog
Articles on readability formulas, editing technique, and the craft of writing for an audience.
RSS feedRunning low- and high-gravity worlds: turning surface g into table rules
Once you have picked a planet's surface gravity, how do you actually play it? Concrete rules for jump distance, fall damage, carrying capacity, movement, and long-term strain — all keyed to the one number that drives them.
How to choose a RAID level: matching redundancy to how much you can lose
RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, and 10 make different trades between usable space, fault tolerance, rebuild risk, and performance. A practical decision guide for picking the level that fits your drive count, capacity, and tolerance for downtime.
The wedding bar budget: turning a drink count into what you actually spend
A shopping list of cases and bottles is only half the job. How bar format, buy-back policies, signature cocktails, and where you buy turn that quantity into a real cost — and how to trim it without leaving guests dry.
Why a cheap KDP paperback can earn you nothing: the print-cost floor explained
Amazon pays paperback royalty as 60% of price minus a print cost that rises with page count. Below a break-even list price the royalty hits zero — here is how to find that floor before you publish.
Dye lots, deductions, and the waste buffer: ordering wallpaper you won't have to reorder
Getting the roll count right is only half the wallpaper order. The other half is buying from one dye lot, setting a sane waste buffer, and deducting doors and windows without shorting yourself.
When to bump the numbers: adjusting party food quantities for your actual event
Standard per-person food figures assume an average event. A lunch, a drinking crowd, an all-buffet spread, or a long cocktail party each pull the numbers in a different direction — here is how to adjust.
Pick the odds first: setting dice target numbers backward from the success rate you want
Most GMs choose a target number and hope it feels fair. Reverse the process — decide the success rate you want, then read the target off the curve — and difficulty stops being a guess.
Working backward from take-home: how to price an Etsy item to a target margin
Knowing what Etsy takes is only half the job. Here is how to run the fee math in reverse — start from the margin you need, and find the price that gets you there.
From board count to lumber order: waste, cuts, and choosing the right board length
A calculator tells you the exact boards a deck needs. The lumberyard order is a different number — here is how waste factor, seam placement, and board length turn one into the other.
Choosing soap oils: balancing hardness, lather, and conditioning
Why cold-process recipes lean on olive, coconut, and castor oil, what each one contributes to a finished bar, and how the blend — not just the lye math — decides whether your soap is hard, bubbly, and gentle.
French drain design: slope, depth, and where the water actually goes
Before you calculate gravel and pipe, get the design right — minimum slope, how deep to dig, which way the perforations face, and where the outlet daylights — because a perfectly built drain to the wrong place still floods.
Why your EV draws more kWh than its battery holds — charging losses explained
The two numbers that make EV running-cost estimates wrong: charging losses (you pay for more energy than reaches the battery) and real-world efficiency (mi/kWh swings with speed, cold, and terrain). Here is how each one moves your cost per mile.
How to run Pictionary without the argument over who wrote the words
The board game works until someone recognises their own clue or picks something impossible to draw. A random word generator with a built-in timer fixes both problems and keeps rounds moving.
Why tongue twisters trip you up — and how to actually practice them
The reason "she sells seashells" defeats your mouth is real linguistics, not clumsiness. Here is what makes a twister hard, and how a random generator with read-aloud helps you drill them.
How long does a 2000-point Warhammer game actually take?
Wargame nights overrun because points, player count, and experience all stretch the clock in ways a rulebook never tells you. Here is how match length really scales — and how to budget your turns.
Running a fair Scattergories round: letters, categories, and the timer nobody argues with
The classic party game lives or dies on setup. How rare letters, category difficulty, and the length of the timer quietly decide whether a round is fun or a coin flip.
Why a random writing prompt beats staring at the blank page
The blank page is a decision problem, not a creativity problem. How a random story prompt breaks the deadlock — and how to use one without letting it box you in.
Why your invented language's names don't sound like they belong together
A worldbuilder's fantasy names often feel like a random grab bag. The fix is phonotactics — a small set of syllable rules that make every coined word sound like it came from the same place.
How much disk will your game audio eat? The PCM math, explained
Voice lines and music are usually the biggest download in an indie game. Here is the exact formula for audio file size, why WAV explodes, and how much OGG or Opus actually saves you.
Sizing a webcam and overlay in OBS: the pixel math behind a clean layout
Where should the webcam go, how big, and what stays inside the safe area? The exact pixel calculations for a stream layout at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K — and how to keep aspect ratios honest.
Is your comic page too cramped? Reading panel, dialogue, and action density
Panels per page, words per panel, and action beats per page each have healthy ranges — and they differ for US comics, manga, and webtoons. How to spot a cramped or under-developed page before you draw it.
Why charades goes stale after ten rounds — and how a real word pool fixes it
Every group defaults to the same five charades words after two rounds. The difficulty-tier and category-pool design behind a word generator that stays fresh for a full party.
Why "a few weeks pass" breaks your campaign timeline — and the date math to fix it
Handwaving a travel montage feels harmless until the harvest festival happens twice in one in-game year. The day-count arithmetic behind building a custom fantasy calendar and converting durations into exact dates.
How a "simple" Game Boy homebrew blows through its cartridge in a week
Eight-bit hardware feels like it should make budgeting easy — the whole console fits in kilobytes, how hard can it be? The tile, map, audio, and code byte-costs behind an accidental over-budget cartridge.
How big should that terrain piece be? The scale math behind 28mm, HO, and 1:35 builds
A "two-story building" means a completely different physical size on a wargaming table, a model railroad, and a diorama shelf. The ratio arithmetic that turns real-world feet into miniature millimeters — and into foam-board layers.
How heavy is your dice hoard? The volume and weight math of polyhedral collecting
A dice collection grows one irresistible set at a time until the bag will not close and the strap digs into your shoulder. The per-set volume and weight arithmetic behind sizing a dice bag — and why metal sets change everything.
Why your pixel art eats megabytes: sprite sheet packing and VRAM math for 2D games
A 32×32 sprite looks tiny until it becomes forty frames of animation in an uncompressed GPU texture. The grid-packing and bits-per-pixel arithmetic behind budgeting texture memory for 2D animations.
Why your D&D combat is running 40 minutes over (and the math to fix it)
The real-world time cost of a D&D or TTRPG encounter is driven by turn time and round count, not "how hard" the fight looks on paper. Here is the arithmetic behind both, with worked examples.
How much paint you actually need for an army (and why "eyeballing it" runs out mid-batch)
Scale and coverage type change paint consumption per model far more than most hobbyists assume. The drop-ratio math behind mixing exactly enough custom color for an entire unit in one batch.
Will your web novel backlog run dry? The buffer math serialized fiction writers skip
Publishing faster than you write feels fine for months, right up until the backlog hits zero all at once. The burn-rate arithmetic behind sustainable release schedules on Royal Road, Wattpad, and Patreon serials.
What AI writing detectors actually measure (and why they get it wrong)
Burstiness, "delve into" transitions, hedging, repeated 3-grams: the measurable patterns behind AI-writing scores, why no score can prove authorship, and how to use one honestly.
The invisible typos: catching colour/color mixes, e-mail vs email, and other consistency slips
Nothing in your document is misspelled, yet it reads as sloppy. How British/American mixes, hyphenation drift, capitalization variants, and clashing number formats creep in — and how to sweep them out.
One page, one minute? Why your screenplay's real runtime depends on what's on the page
The 1-page-per-minute rule breaks exactly when it matters: action pages run long, sitcom banter runs short. How genre and the action/dialogue split change screen time, and how to estimate honestly.
What Etsy actually takes from your sale (and how to price around it)
A full breakdown of Etsy's real fee stack — listing, transaction, payment processing, and ads — and why pricing off "price minus cost" leaves real profit on the table.
KDP royalty tiers explained: why some ebooks earn 70% and others only 35%
How Amazon KDP's price-band eligibility rule, per-megabyte delivery fee, and paperback print-cost floor determine what a self-published book actually earns.
Exclusive vs. non-exclusive ACX distribution: the real royalty math
Why the 40% exclusive royalty rate isn't automatically better than 25% non-exclusive once a narrator royalty-share split enters the picture, with a worked monthly and annual projection.
Why your print-on-demand shop isn't as profitable as it looks
Breaking down base/blank cost, platform fees, payment processing, and ad spend to show why thin per-unit POD margins need volume or ad efficiency to actually work.
The real cost of a handmade candle (it's not just wax)
Walking through wax, fragrance load, pour waste, wick, container, label, packaging, and labor costs with a worked unit-cost example and markup guidance.
Cold-process soap math: superfat, lye, and getting the ratio right
How SAP values, superfat percentage, and water ratio determine the exact lye amount a cold-process soap batch needs, with a worked example and an important lye-safety disclaimer.
Pricing stickers: why bulk orders should cost less per unit
Why a 100-sticker order should never cost 100x a single sticker — the real material and weeding-labor cost stack behind a fair unit price, and how to build a volume discount curve that actually makes sense.
Embroidery pricing: stitch count is the number that matters
Why a small, dense embroidery design can cost more than a large simple one, how the one-time digitizing fee amortizes across a run, and a worked unit-cost example.
How to price art commissions without guessing
Piece type, extra characters, background complexity, and usage license all change what a commission is worth — including the license factor most artists forget to charge for. A full worked example.
Is that craft fair booth actually worth it? Do the math first
A $75 booth fee is the smallest part of what a market day actually costs. How to turn booth fee, travel, rental, and COGS into the two numbers that decide whether to book the table: effective hourly wage and break-even units.
How much resin do you actually need? (mold math explained)
The dimension formula and water-fill method for measuring mold volume, why a waste allowance matters, and how to convert volume into weight and cost — worked examples for a rectangular and a cylinder mold.
Board and batten spacing: the math behind a symmetric accent wall
Why even spacing beats a fixed reveal on a board and batten wall, and the rounding formula — plus the "n+1 gaps" rule — that keeps every batten identical, corner to corner.
Why herringbone tile needs more material than you think
The real reason herringbone (18%) and chevron (20%) tile patterns waste more material than a straight lay (10%), and a worked tiles-boxes-cost example for the same floor in all three patterns.
Planning a deck: boards, gaps, and fasteners that actually add up
Why the 3/16-inch board gap matters, how joist spacing determines your fastener count, and screws vs. hidden clips — with a full worked example for a 20x12 deck.
Wallpaper math: why pattern repeat changes how many rolls you need
How a pattern repeat forces every wallpaper drop to round up to the next full repeat length, cutting usable drops per roll — with a before/after example showing exactly how many more rolls it costs.
Epoxy garage floor coating: how many kits do you actually need?
Why epoxy coverage scales with number of coats and not just floor area, why kits always round up (never split), and when a primer coat is worth the extra cost — with a full worked example.
French drain materials: gravel, pipe, and fabric by the numbers
Why gravel volume must subtract the pipe it surrounds, why landscape fabric matters long-term, and standard depth and slope conventions — with a worked example converting trench dimensions into cubic yards, tons, and cost.
How much soil for a raised garden bed? Bags vs. bulk
Mel's Mix vs. a simple topsoil/compost blend, and the volume threshold where bulk delivery beats bagged soil on cost — with a worked example for multiple beds.
Sizing an LED strip power supply (and avoiding voltage drop)
Why you should never size a PSU to exactly your calculated load, the standard headroom convention, and when a long strip run needs power injection at both ends — with a worked PSU-size lookup.
What it actually costs to charge an EV vs. fill up with gas
Why a "75 kWh battery" costs more than 75 kWh to charge, the real price gap between home and DC fast charging, and a worked road-trip cost comparison against a gas car.
How to size a PC power supply without over- or under-buying
Why headroom above your calculated draw matters for GPU transient spikes, where PSU efficiency actually peaks, and a worked component-by-component wattage example.
What your 3D printer actually costs in electricity (including standby)
Why idle/standby draw quietly adds up over a month, the power difference between FDM and resin printing plus UV cure stations, and worked monthly and annual cost examples.
How long will a portable power station actually last?
Why usable capacity is well below rated capacity, how solar panel wattage determines recharge time, and the startup-surge caveat that catches out compressor devices like fridges.
RAID capacity explained: why your NAS shows less space than the drives promise
A breakdown of the TB-versus-TiB unit gap, how RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, and 10 each trade usable capacity for fault tolerance, and why RAID protects against a dead drive but not against deleted files, ransomware, or a house fire.
How much alcohol to buy for a wedding (without over-ordering)
How to translate guest count, event length, and drinking pace into exact cases of beer, bottles of wine, and bottles of liquor — using the same 12oz beer, 5oz wine pour, and 1.5oz liquor pour math a caterer would use.
How much food to order for a party: a per-person breakdown
Real per-person ounce figures for protein, starch, vegetables, and salad at a sit-down or buffet meal, and pieces-per-person-per-hour math for a cocktail party — with worked examples for both.
How to set your freelance rate (the math most freelancers skip)
Why billable utilization is usually only 50 to 70 percent, why a tax reserve has to be grossed up rather than added on top, and how to turn an annual income target into a defensible hourly and day rate.
The Raygor Readability Graph: grading text by letter count instead of syllables
Raygor works like the Fry graph but swaps syllable counting for a simpler question: how many words are long? Here is why that trade matters, how the graph is plotted, and when to prefer it.
Why your writing feels choppy: measuring cohesion and transitions
Flow is not a mystery — it comes from transition words, paragraph linkage, and pronoun reference. How a cohesion analyzer measures each one, and what to fix when the score comes back low.
How many minutes is my script? Words-per-minute math for voiceover and podcasts
A 1,000-word script can run six minutes or nine depending on pacing. The WPM presets pros actually use, why breaths and pauses add real time, and how to size a script before you record.
How to read the Fry Readability Graph (and why it still beats a single grade number)
The Fry graph plots two numbers instead of computing one formula. Here is what those numbers are, how the curved grade bands work, and why editors still reach for a picture instead of a score.
How to build a cloze test that actually measures comprehension
Interval blanking vs. random blanking, why excluding proper nouns matters, and the scoring bands language teachers use to turn a fill-in-the-blank exercise into a real comprehension signal.
Building a fantasy economy that actually holds together
Why "500 gold for a sword, 5 gold for a horse" breaks immersion, how anchoring every price to one baseline item fixes it, and how economic tiers let you keep the same coinage from a grimdark frontier to a wealthy trade hub.
Powers-Sumner-Kearl: the readability formula built for beginning readers
Why grade-level formulas built for high schoolers fall apart on primary-grade text, how the Powers-Sumner-Kearl formula was calibrated differently, and when to reach for it over Flesch-Kincaid.
Punnett squares for fictional bloodlines: a genetics primer for writers
How to use real Mendelian genetics to plan inherited traits in fantasy families and fan fiction, what a Punnett square actually tells you, and where the model breaks down on purpose.
Pricing laser-cut items for Etsy: what a Glowforge or xTool job really costs
The real cost stack behind a laser-cut item — sheet material, run time, machine wear, and labor — and how to turn it into a wholesale and retail price that actually makes money.
Clause depth, not word count: how a sentence complexity analyzer reads your syntax
Readability formulas count syllables and sentence length. A sentence complexity analyzer goes one level deeper — into clauses, subordination, and passive structure. Here is exactly what it measures and how to use it to untangle dense prose.
How to measure the formality of your writing (and hit the register you are aiming for)
Tone is hard to judge in your own writing. A formality analyzer turns the casual-to-formal axis into a 0–100 score by counting the signals readers react to: slang, contractions, pronouns, passive voice, and Latin-root vocabulary. Here is how it works and how to use it.
Measuring vocabulary sophistication: rare words, CEFR levels, and when "advanced" hurts you
A vocabulary sophistication analyzer estimates how demanding your word choices are — average word length, advanced-word percentage, and a CEFR level estimate. Here is how it decides what counts as advanced, and how to read the result without dumbing your writing down.
Hedge words: when "might", "perhaps", and "appears to" undercut your writing
Hedge words signal uncertainty and drain authority from your prose. What they are, when they belong, and how to find the ones that are quietly weakening every paragraph.
When every sentence starts with "The": fixing monotonous openings
Repetitive sentence openings make prose drone even when each sentence is fine on its own. How to spot the pattern, why it happens, and how to measure your opening variety.
How long should a paragraph be? Counting sentences for rhythm
Paragraph length controls the pace and breathability of your writing. How to count sentences per paragraph, spot the wall-of-text outliers, and edit for rhythm.
EFLAW: the readability score built for non-native English readers
Most readability formulas count syllables and assume a native reader. McAlpine’s EFLAW takes a different angle — it counts the short words that trip up ESL audiences. Here is how the score works, why it correlates with real comprehension, and how to use it.
Word frequency analysis: seeing what your text actually overuses
A word frequency count is the simplest text-analysis tool there is, and one of the most revealing. Here is how stopword filtering changes the picture, why the percentages matter more than the counts, and what to do with the table once you have it.
Lexical diversity: what TTR measures, and why you need MATTR
Type-token ratio is the classic measure of how varied your vocabulary is — and it has one notorious flaw that makes it almost useless for comparing texts of different lengths. Here is how TTR works, why it sinks as text grows, and how MATTR fixes it.
Why your meta tags get cut off: pixels, not characters
Google truncates titles and descriptions by pixel width, not character count — which is why two snippets of the same length can be cut differently. Here are the real limits, why the rules of thumb mislead, and how to write tags that survive.
Sentence length variety: the rhythm metric that makes prose readable
Average sentence length only tells half the story. The standard deviation — how much your sentences vary in length — is what separates flat, monotonous writing from prose with rhythm. Here is how to measure and use it.
Echoes: how to catch the words you accidentally repeat
The same word reused a few sentences apart is one of the most common and invisible writing flaws. Here is why your brain skips over these echoes, how a proximity finder catches them, and how to fix them without a thesaurus binge.
Very, really, just, basically: how to find and cut filler words
The weak words that quietly bloat your writing — intensifiers, hedges, discourse markers, and qualifiers. What each category does, why it weakens prose, and how to find your worst offenders fast.
Lexical density: the simple ratio that measures how packed your writing is
Lexical density is the share of content words versus function words in your text. What it really measures, the typical ranges for speech and academic prose, and why a high score is not always a good thing.
Why your 280-character tweet is actually too long: weighted counting explained
Twitter does not count characters the way you think. Links always cost 23, emoji and CJK count double, and the 280 limit is really a weighted budget. How it works and how to split a long post into a clean thread.
How syllable counting works (and why it quietly drives your readability scores)
The vowel-group heuristic behind automated syllable counting, the silent-e and -le rules that trip it up, why it lands around 95% accurate, and how syllables feed Flesch, SMOG, and Gunning Fog.
The -ly trap: how to find and fix adverb overload
Why -ly adverbs weaken prose, how an automated detector separates real adverbs from false positives, what adverb rate to target, and a practical editing workflow.
N-grams for writers and SEOs: finding the phrases you repeat
What bigrams and trigrams are, how an n-gram analyzer counts and filters them, why stopword handling and lowercasing matter, and how to use phrase frequency for self-editing and keyword research.
Linsear Write: the readability formula that counts easy and hard words by hand
How Linsear Write scores a 100-word sample by weighting easy (≤2 syllable) and hard (3+ syllable) words, why the Air Force built it for hand-calculation, and when it beats the syllable-average formulas.
FORCAST: the readability formula that ignores sentences entirely
Why FORCAST counts only single-syllable words across a 150-word sample, how it scores text with no real sentences — forms, lists, tests — and when it beats Flesch and SMOG.
The Spache Readability Formula: measuring text for the youngest readers
How Spache scores primary-grade (K–4) text against a list of familiar words, why it beats Flesch and Dale–Chall below fourth grade, and how to read its grade output.
Dale–Chall readability explained: the formula that scores words you actually know
Why Dale–Chall measures vocabulary familiarity instead of syllables, how the 3,000-word familiar list works, what the 3.6365 adjustment does, and when it beats Flesch.
The Automated Readability Index: why counting characters beats counting syllables
How ARI turns characters-per-word and sentence length into a US grade level, why it skips syllables, what the −21.43 constant does, and when to trust it over Flesch.
How a passive voice detector actually works (and when to ignore it)
A passive voice detector hunts for one grammatical pattern: a form of "to be" followed by a past participle. Here is exactly how the matching works, why it both over- and under-flags, and how to use the percentage without letting it bully your prose.
The LIX readability index: the formula that does not care about syllables
LIX scores text from just two things you can count without a dictionary: average sentence length and the share of words longer than six letters. That is exactly why it works across languages where Flesch and SMOG fall apart.
The Gunning Fog Index, explained: what the score means and how to lower it
The Gunning Fog Index turns two things you can control — sentence length and the density of long words — into a single school-grade number. Here is exactly how it is calculated, what counts as a "complex" word, and how to bring a foggy paragraph down a grade.
The SMOG index: the readability formula health writers actually trust
SMOG measures one thing — the density of long words — and is calibrated to full comprehension, not the gist. Here is how the score is built, why it reads a grade or two higher than other formulas, and why healthcare writing relies on it.
How to find and fix the clichés hiding in your writing
Clichés slip in precisely because they feel natural — that is the problem. Here is why dead phrases dull your prose, the six families a cliché detector hunts for, and how to swap each one for something that actually says what you mean.
How a headline analyzer scores your title (and what to do with the number)
A headline score is not magic — it is five measurable things added together. Here is exactly what a headline analyzer checks, why length, word balance, and format each move the number, and how to use the score without being fooled by it.
Letter frequency analysis: why E wins and what the counts reveal
Counting letters sounds trivial until you see what the distribution exposes — cracked ciphers, language fingerprints, and skewed prose. How frequency analysis works, what the English baseline means, and how to read the deltas.
Text entropy, explained: what predictability actually measures
Shannon entropy turns "how predictable is this writing?" into a number. What bits-per-symbol mean, why character, word, and bigram modes disagree, and why entropy is a weak AI-detection signal, not a verdict.
The Coleman–Liau Index: the readability formula built for computers
Why Coleman–Liau counts letters instead of syllables, what its L and S variables really mean, when it beats Flesch–Kincaid, and where it quietly misleads.
What is a good keyword density? The honest answer for modern SEO
Keyword density once ruled SEO. Now it is a guardrail, not a target. Here is what density actually measures, the safe range, and how to read 1-, 2-, and 3-word phrase results without falling for the old "magic number" myth.
How long does it take to cross a kingdom? A travel-time guide for writers and GMs
Why fantasy journeys break immersion when the math is wrong, the real-world pace of feet, hooves, wheels, and sails, and how terrain and rations turn a line on a map into a believable trip.
Why you can’t talk to Mars in real time: a sci-fi writer’s guide to light-speed lag
Radio doesn’t travel instantly, and the delay between worlds changes by the day. Here’s the physics of conversation lag, why it breaks naive space scenes, and how to use it as a storytelling tool.
How many blacksmiths does a fantasy town have? Building believable settlements
Why most RPG towns have far too many shops for their size, the medieval demographics that fix it, and how population alone tells you the smiths, inns, gold limit, and farmland a settlement needs.
How much fabric does a cosplay actually need? Stop guessing at the cutting table
Why bolt width, nap, and pattern repeats decide your yardage, how capes and pleated skirts eat more cloth than you think, and how to buy enough the first time.
Designing a planet readers will believe: a worldbuilder's guide to gravity
How surface gravity really works, what high- and low-g worlds do to bodies, jumps, and buildings, and how to pick numbers that keep a fictional planet physically honest.
The real odds of pulling that chase card (and why the box let you down)
How booster-pack pull rates actually work, why "1 in 200" doesn't mean 200 packs, and the probability every card collector and game designer should understand.
From word count to finished draft: planning a novel you will actually finish
Genre word-count targets, how manuscript words turn into print pages, and the daily-target math that makes a deadline realistic instead of aspirational.
Syncing delay and reverb to your tempo: the BPM-to-milliseconds guide
Why time-based effects sound better locked to the beat, the one formula that converts BPM to milliseconds, and how to use note divisions, dotted, and triplet times in a mix.
How to price a 3D print: the costs every maker forgets
A full breakdown of what a 3D print actually costs to produce — filament, power, machine wear, failed prints, and labor — and how to turn that into a price that earns a profit.
How reading time is calculated (and why every blog uses a different number)
The formulas behind "X minute read" labels, the wide range of WPM assumptions, and how to pick a number that matches your audience.
Dice pool probability for tabletop games: why the average roll lies to you
How dice pools really behave — bell curves vs. flat d20s, what advantage actually does to your odds, exploding dice, and how to set fair target numbers.
Every readability formula explained, briefly
A reference guide to 12 readability formulas — how each works, where it came from, its strengths and limits, and when to reach for it instead of the alternatives.
What is a good Flesch Reading Ease score? (with concrete examples)
A grounded answer with score bands, real examples from journalism and fiction, and what scores to target for blogs, marketing, technical docs, and academic writing.
How to lower your readability score: a practical editing playbook
Concrete techniques to bring a Flesch–Kincaid or Gunning Fog score down by 2–4 grade levels without losing accuracy or sounding patronising.
Flesch vs Gunning Fog vs SMOG: which readability formula should you use?
Three popular readability formulas, side by side. When each is the right tool, what they get wrong, and how to read disagreements between them.