ClickHelp User Manual

Flesch Reading Ease

Flesch Reading Ease is a readability metric used to indicate how difficult a text is to understand, it's based on two factors:

  • Sentence length as judged by the average number of words in a sentence.
  • Word length as judged by the average number of syllables in a word.

This readability score range is from 0 to 100, the values should be interpreted as follows:

Value School level Student age range Notes
100.00 - 90.00 5th grade 11 Very easy to read. Easily understood by an average 11-year-old student.
90.0 - 80.0 6th grade 11-12 Easy to read. Conversational English for consumers.
80.0 - 70.0 7th grade 12-13 Fairly easy to read.
70.0 - 60.0 8th grade - 9th grade 13-15 Standard, plain English. Easily understood by 13- to 15-year-old students.
60.0 - 50.0 10th grade - 12th grade 15-18 Fairly difficult to read.
50.0 - 30.0 College 18-19 Difficult to read.
30.0 - 0.0 College graduate 22-23 Very difficult to read. Best understood by university graduates.
Note

Originally, all the metrics were created for the English language and the education system of the United States. In ClickHelp, the metrics are available for all languages. Because of this, school levels and age ranges may be off for other languages. But the relative values will still be correct, so you can compare the readability of two different topics that use the same language. For example, if your topic got 100 according to Flesch Reading Ease, and another topic got 80, it means that the text of the second topic is more difficult to read, than the text of the first one.

If the value of a readability metric is zero for your topic, check the selected language for your project to make sure it matches the language of the actual text. Also, make sure the punctuation is correct and all sentences end with a dot.