Score your text with Flesch–Kincaid, Gunning Fog, SMOG, Coleman-Liau, ARI, Linsear Write, FORCAST, and Dale-Chall at once. Get a consensus grade level and see where the formulas agree or disagree.
Built and maintained by Paul Clark, Redmoon Software · Last verified · Sources
Use the consensus score when you need one defensible grade-level number and you don't know which formula the audience cares about. For health writing you should still report SMOG; for K-12 still report Spache or Dale-Chall. The consensus shines for general business, marketing, or web copy.
The consensus replaces running each formula tab-by-tab. The trade-off: you lose the per-formula context (tips, pitfalls) that each individual tool provides. Use both — consensus for the headline number, individual formulas to diagnose why.
The consensus tool runs nine readability formulas on the same text in parallel: Flesch–Kincaid, Gunning Fog, SMOG, Coleman-Liau, ARI, Linsear Write, FORCAST, Dale-Chall, and a grade-converted Flesch Reading Ease.
It reports the median grade as the consensus and the spread (max − min) as an agreement indicator.
High agreement (spread < 2 grades) means all formulas concur. Wide spread suggests mixed sentence lengths or vocabulary.
Flesch–Kincaid, Gunning Fog, SMOG, Coleman-Liau, ARI, Linsear Write, FORCAST, Dale-Chall, and a grade-converted Flesch Reading Ease.
No single formula is reliable across every text type. The median across many formulas is robust to outliers and more defensible as a single number.
Spread less than 2 grade levels between the highest and lowest formula. Wide spread (>5 grades) means the formulas disagree, often due to mixed sentence lengths or vocabulary.
Input
Standard business prose: 4 sentences, mix of common and technical vocabulary.
Output
Consensus grade 10.4 — moderate agreement (spread 3.1 grades).
Eight formulas land between grade 8.6 and 11.7. The median (10.4) is the single most defensible grade level when no formula has special claim on the text type.
This tool runs the grade-level formulas and reports a consensus. Averaging helps with one specific problem: each formula has idiosyncratic failure modes — the syllable heuristic misfiring on names, Fog over-penalising unavoidable technical vocabulary, SMOG's stricter calibration — and those errors are partly independent, so they partly cancel.
It does not fix the error every formula shares. All of them measure surface mechanics only. Averaging six measurements of sentence and word length gives you a better measurement of sentence and word length, not a measurement of comprehensibility. Text that is well-formed and meaningless scores well on all six.
The spread between formulas is the more informative output. When the individual scores cluster within a grade of each other, the consensus is solid. When they scatter across four grades, something in the text is unusual — heavy proper nouns, list-like structure, dialogue — and the right response is to look at the text, not to trust the average.
The method behind this tool, so you can check it rather than take it on trust.
See the individual formula pages for each source.
This tool does not introduce a formula of its own — it averages the grade-level outputs of the others, so its authority is theirs.
Classic 0–100 readability score.
Readability scoresU.S. grade level for your text.
Readability scoresPenalises complex (3+ syllable) words.
Readability scoresHealth & medical text grade level.