One of the best ways to determine whether or not your readers can understand your content is by analyzing its readability. When information is presented in a way that’s easy to comprehend, it’s retained more easily by your readers. However, there are different levels of readability depending on your target audience. You wouldn’t expect a 10-year-old to be able to read and understand a research study on nuclear physics, so readability comes into play as a way for you to “gauge” how understandable your content is.
The problem is, how do you measure this kind of comprehension? Various formulas have been created over the years, measuring everything from the number of syllables in a word to the length of sentences and everything in between in an attempt to give content creators some general idea as to how readable their content is and which age range is best served by it.
Many word processing programs like Microsoft Office Word and many online tools like Originality.ai’s own free text readability analyzer, can analyze your writing and provide you with these scores, but how do you check readability in Google Docs?
Google Docs surprisingly does not have a built-in readability analyzer. There are some browser extensions available for Google Chrome that attempt to solve this issue, but as with any extension, you can’t be fully sure of what it is you’re actually adding to Chrome, and some extensions can do more harm than good by, for example, slowing down your browser or collecting private information as you browse.
With this in mind, we don’t recommend downloading a browser extension to check readability in Google Docs. There’s a better way to check readability (and much more) and it works with text you’ve written in Google Docs. Here’s how to do it, step-by-step:
Step 1: Select the Text in Google Docs
You can either highlight the text with the mouse if you only want to check the readability of certain sections, or you can press Ctrl+A (or Command+A on Mac) to select all of the text.
Step 2: Copy the Text
The next step is to copy the text, which you can do by pressing Ctrl+C (or Command+C on Mac). It will appear as if nothing has happened but the text has been copied internally to the clipboard.
Step 3: Open Originality.ai’s Text Readability Checker
Visit https://originality.ai/readability-checker. The readability checker will load and the page will look like this:
Step 4: Paste the text
In the text field where it says “Enter at least 100 words of text then click Analyze, place your mouse cursor (you can click backspace to get rid of that default text), then press Ctrl+V (or Command+V on Mac) to paste in the text you selected previously.
The result will look something like this:
You’ll notice at the bottom that you’ll get a quick word count. You can click the green Analyze button from here to analyze the text or check out the FAQ if you have questions.
Within just a few seconds you’ll see the text box highlighted with several different colors. To the right, you’ll also get an approximate U.S. grade level for your writing per the Flesch Kincaid readability formula. For example, this article is designed to be easily understood at a 9th grade reading level or above, so around 15 years old or older, which is a general readability goal to hit for most types of content.
The highlighted text has a color coded key below the Analyze and FAQ buttons which will show you which words and sentences are hard or very hard to read and that may be worth revising if you need to adjust the text for a broader readability range.
Originality.ai’s Google Docs readability checker, in addition to telling you your Flesch Kincaid Grade Level in terms of readability, also offers you several other options to get the full picture of your content’s readability, including:
Beyond the Flesch Kincaid readability grade level, you’ll also see how your text readability performs according to other types of formulas as well, including:
As with the words themselves, the red highlighted scores are higher grade levels, with the orange scores in the middle, and green scores for lower grade levels.
Text issues will tell you some of the core analytics behind your content, including:
Do you actually need to know all of this if you just want to check readability in Google Docs? No, but it does help you to get the full picture of readability according to different types of scales and formulas, and that is important to keep your audience engaged and interested in what you have to say.
If you’d like the specifics about your text, you can click the Text Stats tab to see similar information including your longest sentence, number of paragraphs, the average speaking time, reading time and much more. If you’re writing content that someone else is going to read, it’s a good idea to keep these stats in mind to help make it easier for them to read your content.
A must for optimizing your content for the search engines, the Keyword Density checker will tell you your top 10 keywords and phrases (double keywords).
All of these built-in options make the free readability checker from Originality.ai the best way to check readability in Google Docs.
Did you know that checking readability of your Google Doc is just one of the things you can do with Originality.ai? You can also check for plagiarism and check for AI-written content in just a few clicks using the premium version of Originality.ai. With prices as low as 1 cent per 100 words scanned, you can optionally scan for plagiarism and/or AI-writing on a case by case basis, and with a built-in top-up feature, you never have to worry about running out of credits when you need them.
Try it now for yourself and get the full picture of your document’s readability and originality!
