Academic writing has different rules. Grade 13-16+ is normal — papers in your field expect domain vocabulary and complex sentences. The goal isn't to lower readability; it's to make sure complexity is purposeful, not accidental.
Grade 13-16 on Flesch-Kincaid is typical for journal articles. Top-tier social sciences sit around Grade 14; STEM papers often hit Grade 16-18. Above Grade 20 is usually a writing problem masquerading as rigor — sentences too long, clauses too dense.
Not artificially. Your advisor wants rigorous argument and field-appropriate vocabulary. Use the readability score to spot accidental complexity — a single 60-word sentence buried in your literature review — not to dumb down your argument.
Gunning Fog penalizes long sentences AND polysyllabic words separately. For academic writing where polysyllables are unavoidable (you'll never simplify "phenomenology"), Fog gives you a more useful signal: are the polysyllables doing work, or just inflating prose?
Yes — AI tends to produce flat-rhythm prose that scores Grade 14-16 uniformly. Human academic writing varies more: some sentences are tight (Grade 9), some are dense (Grade 22). If your draft is uniformly Grade 15, run it through paraphrasing tools to add rhythmic variance.
3 free scans/day, no card. See if your draft reads AI-generated.