Flesch Reading Ease Example: A Deliberately Unreadable Page
Vulcan read my memoirs at his forge and was obliged to stop and melt down the sentences.
The short answer
- What it is
- A hard-to-read page uses long sentences and long words that most readers struggle with. Its Flesch score falls in the Difficult or Very difficult band.
- Why it matters
- Readers leave pages they cannot follow, even when the facts are good. Plain text is also easier to quote, translate, and scan on a phone.
- How a crawler should report it
- A crawler should report the Flesch score and its band for each page in a supported language. This lab warns when the score is under 50 and the page has at least 100 words.
- Live examples
/lab/hard-to-read/(positive)/lab/hard-to-read/near-miss/(near miss)
How long words and long sentences lower a reading score
Flesch reading ease is a score for how easy English text is to read. Rudolf Flesch published it in 1948. The formula is 206.835 - 1.015 x (words / sentences) - 84.6 x (syllables / words). Higher is easier. A score of 90 or more is very easy. A score from 60 to 70 is plain English. A score from 30 to 50 is difficult, and below 30 is very difficult.
Low scores have clear causes. Long sentences with many clauses pull the score down. Long words pull it down even faster, because each extra syllable has a large weight in the formula. Legal text, academic text, and corporate copy often score low. Lists with no end marks can also hurt, because a tool may read a whole list as one long sentence.
Browsers do nothing with this score. Google has not named Flesch as a ranking signal, and a low score will not trigger a penalty. The effect is on people. If readers give up, the page does not meet their need. The score does not check facts, order, or tone, either. Some topics need long terms, and a specialist audience may be fine with them. Treat the score as a guide.
To detect the problem, take the main text, count sentences, words, and syllables, and apply the formula. Tools count syllables in slightly different ways, so scores can differ by a few points. The formula is built for English, and other languages need their own version. To fix a low score, split long sentences. Replace long words with common ones. Use active verbs. Then run the score again and read the page aloud.