Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test

While I'm talking about words, especially unknown ones, here's a way to gauge how difficult a text supposedly is. The Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test.

It's pretty much the de facto standard for measuring a texts readability and what grade level it's written for. The scales are a little hard to conceptualize (for me) at first because for the Ease of Reading metric, the HIGHER the number the easier something is said to be to read. That seems backwards to me, but...that's me.

If you have the inclination it's fun to measure your own work and see where it stands. There are some automated tools online to do this but I have no idea how accurate they (or any of this) really is.

Btw this is the score for the text above this line:

Number of characters (without spaces) : 539.00
Number of words : 123.00
Number of sentences : 8.00
Average number of characters per word : 4.38
Average number of syllables per word : 1.49
Average number of words per sentence: 15.38

Indication of the number of years of formal education that a person requires in order to easily understand the text on the first reading
Gunning Fog index : 9.40

Approximate representation of the U.S. grade level needed to comprehend the text :
Coleman Liau index : 8.06
Flesh Kincaid Grade level : 7.96
ARI (Automated Readability Index) : 6.90
SMOG : 9.71

Flesch Reading Ease : 65.36

List of sentences which we suggest you should consider to rewrite to improve readability of the text :

The scales are a little hard to conceptualize (for me) at first because for the Ease of Reading metric, the HIGHER the number the easier something is said to be to read.
There are some automated tools online to do this but I have no idea how accurate they (or any of this) really is.

I was just thinking that this would be VERY FUN to do to people's emails to see at what level they write at on average...hmmm

Another version of the test is here.