Text Statistics

What text statistics reveal

Beyond a raw word count, text analysis estimates reading time, scores readability, approximates a grade level, and ranks keyword density. Together they tell you whether a passage is scannable, who can follow it, and what it is really about.

Reading time and word count

Reading time is just word count divided by a reading speed, commonly 200 to 250 words per minute for silent reading of general prose. Technical material reads slower. The number is an estimate, useful for setting expectations on an article, not a precise measurement.

Readability scores

The Flesch Reading Ease score runs from 0 to 100, where higher is easier. Roughly 90 to 100 is very easy (around a 5th-grade level), 60 to 70 is plain English, and 0 to 30 is very difficult, the territory of academic and legal writing. It is driven by sentence length and syllables per word, so trimming long sentences lifts the score fast. The Flesch-Kincaid grade level maps the same inputs onto US school grades.

Example

Words: 312
Reading time: ~1.4 min @ 220 wpm
Flesch Reading Ease: 64 (plain English)
Grade level: 8.1
Top keyword: "cache" (3.5% density)

Keyword density, with a caveat

Density is the share of total words a term occupies. It helps spot what a page emphasizes, but chasing a target percentage is outdated SEO advice; modern ranking cares about meaning, not repetition. Densities above a few percent often read as stuffed and awkward.

FAQ

Why does my technical post score as hard to read? Long sentences and multi-syllable jargon drive the Flesch score down. Short sentences raise it even when the vocabulary stays specialized.

Are syllable counts exact? No, they are estimated heuristically, so unusual words and names can throw the grade level off by a bit.

Does it count code or markup as words? It depends on input; paste plain prose for an accurate reading estimate, since symbols and tags skew both counts.