Method / Indicator
Niral Score
How calmly a report is written, every reading in one number. 100 is a calm, plain report; 0 is anxiety-ridden. It reads the writing, not the events.
0 anxiety-ridden calm 100
What every band means is on the Calm Index. The words beside the number (“calm writing”, “tense writing”) are about how the story is told, never about what happened.
The name
The Niral Score is named after Mundane Read’s founder, Niral Shah.
What the numbers usually look like
Most reports are written fairly plainly, so most score in the 80s or low 90s. Of 484 full-length articles published between July and September 2026, scored the way the site scores today, half scored between 84 and 91, and nine in ten between 79 and 93.
The differences are in a few kinds of word: verdicts and loaded verbs, drama in the telling, and claims nobody puts their name to. A report at 80 carries noticeably more of those than one at 92. A difference of a point or two says very little, which is why the Calm Index calls outlets within a point of each other too close to call.
What lowers it
- Judgement words and verdicts ("slammed", "regime"), which weigh most
- Drama in the telling ("horror", "carnage")
- Adjectives that describe rather than report
- Coded political vocabulary
- Claims with nobody’s name on them
What is never counted
- Anything inside a quotation
- How serious or sad the events are
- Whether the article is correct
When it appears beside a story
Shown beside every story we score.
Calmest in the last week
- A16z-backed EliseAI raises $350M, doubles valuation to $4B Niral Score 97.3
- Alleged drug boss Arash Ebrahimi Far detained in Colombia Niral Score 97
- Craig Bellamy urges Wales improvement but wary of Norway’s threat Niral Score 96.8
Least calm in the last week
- Tom Cruise goes full clown in Digger. It might be his best work yet Niral Score 68
- If only all games had Control Resonant's Assist Mode Niral Score 68.8
- Anthropic says its IPO could herald the end of the world as we know it Niral Score 71.1
Every reading describes how the article is written, not whether it is correct. The full method, including how the Niral Score is built, is on the Method page. Anything here can be checked against the API, which returns the same numbers with the words that produced them.
The other indicators
AdjectivesRepeated wordsSentimentPolitical dictionGenerationalGenderJingoisticReligiousSourcingMood