How to Check If Your Writing Is Too Complex (and Fix It)

Most people overestimate how clear their writing is. The text makes sense to them because they already understand the subject — but the reader doesn't. The gap between 'I understood what I wrote' and 'a stranger would understand what I wrote' is exactly what readability tools measure. Finding that gap is the first step to closing it.

The two things that make writing hard to read

Long sentences — anything over 25 words starts to lose readers. The average sentence in well-edited online content is 15–20 words. A 40-word sentence forces the reader to hold too many clauses in working memory.
Long words — multi-syllable words are harder to parse, not because readers can't understand them, but because they slow the reading pace. 'Utilize' (3 syllables) carries the same meaning as 'use' (1 syllable), and 'use' lets the reader move on faster.

The numbers to aim for

Flesch Reading Ease: aim for 60–70 for general online content. Below 50 is 'difficult' — fine for academic papers, but not for product pages or help docs.
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: aim for grade 8 or below (roughly age 13–14). Most web content sits between grades 6 and 8. Grade 12+ is college-level and loses a large chunk of your audience.
Average sentence length: 15–20 words. If your average is above 25, you have sentences that need splitting.
Average syllables per word: 1.4–1.6 is the sweet spot. Above 1.8 means you're using too many long words.

A real editing workflow

Paste your draft into a readability tool and note the scores. Don't fix anything yet — just get the baseline.
Find the longest sentences first. Split each one at a conjunction ('and', 'but', 'because') or a comma that introduces a new idea. Two short sentences beat one long one.
Replace long words with short ones where the meaning doesn't change. 'Demonstrate' → 'show'. 'Facilitate' → 'help'. 'Subsequently' → 'then'.
Cut filler phrases. 'In order to' → 'to'. 'It is important to note that' → delete entirely. 'At this point in time' → 'now'.
Re-check the scores. If they improved, stop. Don't over-optimize — a score of 80 when you started at 55 is a win; pushing to 90 might flatten your voice.

The Hemingway principle

Ernest Hemingway's style is extreme — almost no words over two syllables, almost no sentences over fifteen words. You don't need to write like Hemingway, but his constraint is a useful editing tool: try rewriting your most complex paragraph in his style, then relax the constraint where it damages the meaning.

When complexity is correct

Technical, medical, and legal writing needs its own vocabulary. You can't explain a cardiac arrhythmia without the word 'arrhythmia', and you can't describe a REST API without 'endpoint' and 'payload'. The readability score will drop, and that's fine — the audience for those documents expects technical language. The rule is: use the simplest word that's precise, not the simplest word that exists.

Readability scores don't measure quality

A perfectly clear, important paragraph can score poorly because it uses necessary technical terms. A shallow, fluffy paragraph can score well because it uses short, simple words. Use the score as a diagnostic, not a verdict.

Analyze your text complexity

Writing Studio calculates Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, Gunning Fog, Coleman-Liau, and more — with live highlighting of long sentences and complex words as you type.

Open Writing Studio

Passive voice is invisible to every readability formula

Flesch, Gunning Fog, and Coleman-Liau all work purely from sentence length and word/syllable length — none of them parse grammar, so none of them detect passive voice at all. "The report was reviewed by the committee" and "The committee reviewed the report" score identically on every standard readability formula, despite the passive version being measurably harder to follow: it delays the actor, adds words, and forces the reader to hold the sentence open longer before it resolves. A text can score well on every standard metric and still read sluggishly because of passive construction — worth checking for separately, by eye, since no formula will flag it.

The blind spot none of these scores catch: paragraph length

Readability formulas work within sentences — they have nothing to say about how sentences are grouped into paragraphs. A page of technically short, simple sentences with no paragraph breaks for six hundred words still reads as a wall of text, and readers abandon a wall of text regardless of how short its individual sentences are. Breaking content into shorter paragraphs, with white space between them, measurably increases how much of a page actually gets read — a layout effect that sits entirely outside what any sentence-level readability score can measure, and one worth checking manually even after the formula says the text is fine.