How hard is this to read?

What the reading score is

The reading score is a readability index from 0 to 100, shown with a plain-language label — High School, College, Academic, Graduate, Expert. Higher means harder to read: longer sentences, denser vocabulary, more clauses to hold in your head at once. A low score reads like a newspaper brief; a high score reads like a journal article.

The label and the number say the same thing two ways. They're a heads-up about the effort a piece will ask of you — nothing more.

How it's derived

Arc Codex averages four standard readability metrics — Flesch-Kincaid, Coleman-Liau, SMOG, and Dale-Chall — and projects that average onto the 0–100 scale. Four measures instead of one smooths out the quirks any single formula has with a given kind of writing.

One honest caveat about our sibling site, Huntaegis: it projects a single Flesch-Kincaid grade onto the same 0–100 scale rather than averaging four. The labels mean the same thing on both sites — the inputs behind them differ. We'd rather tell you than let you assume the two numbers are computed identically.

What it's for — and what it isn't

The reading score describes the writing, not the reporting. It says nothing about whether an article is accurate, fair, important, or true. A dense, high-scoring piece is not better journalism than a plain one — it's just harder to read. A simple, low-scoring piece can be the more careful and more honest of the two.

A high score means dense prose. It never means better journalism.

The objectivity score

Alongside the reading score sits a separate 0–100 objectivity score. It measures how far the language leans toward opinion versus neutral description — a piece thick with loaded, persuasive wording scores low; one that mostly reports plainly scores high. Like the reading score, it annotates the prose and decides nothing about what you get to read. For corpus-wide patterns across everything Arc Codex has measured, see the live dashboard.