Saramsha

No. 035  ·  21 October 2026

The Shape Your Sentences Make

Two numbers predict how hard a piece of writing feels: how long its sentences run, and how many syllables its words carry. Type or paste anything and watch those two numbers become a skyline — one bar per sentence — while the words doing the heavy lifting light up where they stand.

One bar per sentence taller is longer, redder is denser

The text itself, long words marked

About this piece

Two formulas, one idea: shorter wins

In 1948 Rudolf Flesch, trying to give publishers a way to judge how hard a manuscript would be to read, reduced that whole question to two ratios: the average number of words in a sentence, and the average number of syllables in a word. Nothing about vocabulary, nothing about meaning, nothing about whether an idea is actually simple — just length, counted twice, at two different scales. His Reading Ease score is 206.835 − 1.015 × (words per sentence) − 84.6 × (syllables per word), tuned so a text of short sentences built entirely from one-syllable words scores near 100, and falls as either number climbs. In 1975 J. Peter Kincaid re-weighted the same two ratios into a grade level for the US Navy, which needed to know whether a technical manual matched the reading level of the sailors issued it: 0.39 × (words per sentence) + 11.8 × (syllables per word) − 15.59, giving back a number that reads like a school year.

What's striking is not the arithmetic but how little it needs. Both formulas were tested against real readers taking comprehension tests, and the correlation held up well enough that courts in several US states now require consumer insurance policies to clear a minimum Flesch score before they can be sold, and Microsoft Word has shipped a readability statistics panel using this exact formula since 1993. Two numbers, each trivial to count by hand, turned out to explain most of what makes a sentence a slog — which is the thing this page is built to make visible rather than just report. The skyline above is sentence length, bar by bar; the colour of each bar is that sentence's own average syllables per word; the marked words below are the ones actually carrying that weight.

Two honest caveats. First, counting syllables correctly needs a pronunciation dictionary, and this page doesn't carry one — it estimates by counting vowel clusters, the same rough trick most browser-side readability tools use, which agrees with a dictionary on the vast majority of English words but can be off by one on an unusual one. Second, and more importantly: length is not the same thing as difficulty. A sentence can be short and still opaque if it leans on an unfamiliar word, and a long sentence of entirely familiar words can read easily if its clauses are laid end to end rather than nested inside each other. These formulas don't see jargon, nesting, ambiguity or passive voice at all — they see two averages. That they predict as much as they do says something slightly uncomfortable about how much of "hard to read" really is just "long."

Everything here runs in this browser tab; nothing you type is sent anywhere. Sentences are split with the browser's own Unicode sentence-boundary rules where available, and by punctuation otherwise.