Grade 8 is the ceiling: how we write for real people

Every string on this site that a human being will read has to pass a reading-level test before it can ship. The test uses the Flesch-Kincaid grade formula. The ceiling is grade ten. The goal is grade eight, which is roughly the reading level of a thirteen-year-old and also the ceiling used by most plain-language writing guides around the world.

Short sentences. Common words. One idea at a time. Technical terms only when they are the honest name of the thing. Numbers written in full so there is no room to misread them.

This matters most for legal pages. A privacy policy written at grade fourteen is not readable by the majority of adults, no matter where they went to school. Ours sits at grade seven. So do the terms of service, the accessibility statement, and the cookie notice. A person does not have to earn the right to understand what we do with their data.

The test lives in a small script called readability.mjs inside our CI folder. It runs on every pull request. If any string scores above the ceiling, the build stops and we rewrite the line. There is no setting to switch this off for a release, because a deadline is never a good reason to write above our readers.

If you hit a page that feels hard to read, that is a bug. Please tell us and we will fix it in the next release.