Writing Clarity Index Calculator

The Clarity Index gives you a quick check of how clear your writing is. Read More Below...

Enter 180-200 words from an e-mail or report into the box below, and click the button to see how clear you are being. If using an e-mail, ignore hello and goodbye lines (e.g. "Hi Christina," and "See you Saturday, John")

About This Tool

The Clarity Index is a tool that was developed by the US Army to encourage personnel to be more clear with their writing.

When you are trying to communicate through writing, it can be very difficult to work out if you are being clear or not. It seems such a subjective thing to measure.

In the business/academic world, the Clarity Index gives you an amazingly simple way of checking if you are making things too complicated, or if you are being too abrupt.

It does this by using a combination of the average words per sentence (aim for 15) and the percentage of your total text that are "long words" (aim for 15%).

The actual calculation is a bit complicated - and can take more than a minute to perform if you do it manually. This tool takes just seconds.

Copy a chunk of text - e.g. part of an e-mail or a report, between 180-200 words - into the box above and you will see the Clarity Index. Aim for a result of 20-40, with 30 being ideal.