tests and tools

This profile is under development. It considers online readability tests. 

     Tests

Basic measures of readability include the Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid tests (featured on Microsoft Word), the Fry Formula, SMOG (Simple Measure of Gobbledegook) test and Gunning Fog index.

They are indicative only (readability online can be significantly affected by placement and format of the text) and as Rudolf Flesch commented in his The Art of Readable Writing (New York: Wiley 94) -

Some readers, I am afraid, will expect a magic formula for good writing and will be disappointed with my little yardstick... What I hope for are readers who won't take the formula too seriously and won't expect from it more than a rough estimate.

It is generally accepted that simply writing for a low score will not, in itself, improve the comprehensibility of a page. Substantial empirical research suggests that users have a 'preferred reading level' online and offline, influenced by

Interest - as Keith Rayner & Alexander Pollatsek note in The Psychology of Reading (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall 89) users will read at a higher level than normal if interested in the subject matter.

Readability of the type - a user's preferred reading level decreases when type is too small, too dense, too faint or reversed out of a colour (showing up as white on a colored or black background). There's a detailed discussion in Miles Tinker's lucid Legibility of Print (Ames: Iowa State Uni Press 63)

Sentence length and redundancy - short sentences and reinforcement of ideas help people to read at higher levels than they're used to.

Format - white space and pertinent illustrations provide visual breaks that encourage the reader to keep going and "make the overall appearance of the material".

Conceptual density - too many new concepts or excessive condensation in a given number of words tend to deter users.

The Flesch formula measures reading ease and 'human interest', based on four principles:

1. the more syllables in a word, the harder it is to read and understand that word.

2. the more words in a sentence, the harder it is to read and understand.

3. the more words about people there are in a passage, the more "interesting" it is to read.

4. the more sentences "addressed to an audience", the more interesting that passage is to read.

Another indicator of readbility is provided by the US FORCAST formula developed for technical material.

Readability =

20 - number of one-syllable words 10

1. count the number of one syllable words in a 150 word passage

2. divide that number by 10

3. subtract the answer from 20.

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