Reading Level Isn't Just for Kids' Books, Why Adults Should Check Their Writing's Grade Level

A manager I used to work with sent emails that needed a second read every single time. Not because the topics were complicated, but because the sentences were thirty words long with three subordinate clauses stacked on top of each other. He wasn't trying to sound smart. He just genuinely didn't realize how dense his writing had gotten, because to him, it read perfectly clearly. He'd written it, after all.

That's the trap with reading level. You're always the worst judge of how readable your own writing is, because you already know what you meant. Everyone else is reading it cold.

What a reading level score actually measures

Readability formulas, like Flesch-Kincaid, mostly look at two things: how long your sentences are, and how long your words are. Shorter sentences and shorter, more common words score as easier to read. Longer sentences packed with multisyllabic words score as harder, often landing at a "college graduate" or even "post-graduate" reading level.

The output is usually expressed as a grade level, like "8th grade" or "12th grade," which tells you roughly what level of schooling someone would need to read the text comfortably on the first pass. It's not a perfect measurement and it doesn't capture things like whether your ideas are interesting or your argument makes sense, but it's a genuinely useful proxy for one specific thing: how much effort it takes to get through your sentences.

Why this matters even if your audience is highly educated

Here's the part people miss. A high reading level doesn't make you sound smarter. It makes you harder to read, and most readers, regardless of how educated they are, will skim, half-read, or completely abandon dense writing if they can avoid it. Nobody enjoys parsing a thirty-word sentence with four commas, even if they technically could.

The most widely-read writing in the world, from major news outlets to well-known nonfiction books, tends to sit around an 8th to 10th grade reading level, even when it's covering genuinely complex topics like economics or science. That's not because the audience can't handle anything harder. It's because clear, short sentences are easier to follow regardless of how smart the reader is, and clarity is what actually gets your point across.

Writing simply isn't the same as writing for simple people. It's writing for people who have other things to do besides decode your sentences.

Where this shows up in everyday writing

• Work emails that bury the actual ask in the middle of a long paragraph
• Cover letters that try to sound formal and end up sounding stiff and hard to follow
• Reports and proposals where the key point gets lost in dense, jargon-heavy sentences
• Website copy that explains a product in a way that makes visitors leave before they understand it

How to actually bring your reading level down

The fix isn't dumbing down your ideas, it's tightening your sentences. Split long sentences into two shorter ones. Cut words that aren't doing real work. Swap a fancier word for a plainer one when they mean the same thing. None of this makes your writing less sophisticated, it just makes it land faster.

I started running my own emails through a readability check a while back, mostly out of curiosity, and it genuinely changed how I write. Not because I started dumbing things down, but because I started noticing exactly which sentences were the ones making people's eyes glaze over, and I could fix them before hitting send instead of after.

Before you send anything important

1. Run your draft through a readability checker, especially for emails and reports going to a wide audience
2. Look for any sentence flagged as long or complex and try splitting it in two
3. Replace unnecessarily fancy words with plainer ones that mean the same thing
4. Read it once more out loud, since awkward phrasing is much easier to catch by ear