How hard is this to read?
A number for the prose, not a verdict on the piece. Here is exactly what it measures and what it doesn't.
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.
The measure only understands English. For a story published in another language we score the English translation shown on the page and say so under the dial. Translation can flatten tone, so those scores are softer than scores on text written in English.
View the live dashboardHow stories are chosen
These scores describe a story once it is published. The rules that decide which stories are published in the first place (the sources we read, the filters, the topic ranking) are listed, with today's settings, on a separate page.
How we choose what to publish