Assessing Readability
What is Readability?
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Readability is a way of deciding how hard a
text is. It is a good idea to know how hard a
text is before you assign it to be read in a
class.
Readability formulas take into account the
length of words as well as the length of
sentences.
You can use this readability method on the handouts
you give to make sure they are at an appropriate level
of readability.
How to Assess Readability
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One of the easiest ways to measure readability is to use the Flesch
Reading Ease formula, which is readily available on Microsoft Word.
Type in approximately 200 words of the text, in their original sentence
structure.
Under “Tools,” go to “Options.” When the menu box appears, click on
“Spelling and Grammar” and make sure the “Show Readability Statistics”
choice has a checkmark beside it.
After you have typed in your text and made sure the spelling/grammar
tool will give you readability stats, then do a grammar check on the text
you have typed in. Ignore everything it finds (unless you made a typo).
At the end of the grammar check, a box will pop up with the statistics,
including a Reading Ease score and an approximate grade level. More
information will be provided about the Reading Ease Score.
Quick SMOG* Method
Total polysyllabic word ct.
Approx. grade level (+/- 1.5)
0-2
4
3-6
5
7-12
6
13-20
7
31-42
9
43-56
10
57-72
11
73-90
12
91-110
13
111-132
14
133-156
15
157-182
16
183-210
17
211-240
18
Count the number of
polysyllabic words in a
chain of 30 sentences
and look up the
approximate grade
level on this table.
*I have no idea what
“SMOG” stands for. I
found this method on the
web about four years ago.
Flesch Reading Ease Information
The Flesch Reading Ease Scale measures readability on a scale of 1-100:
100
Very easy to read.
Average sentence length is 12 words or less. No words of more than two
syllables.
65
Plain English.
Average sentence length is 15 to 20 words. Average word has two syllables.
0
Extremely difficult to read.
Average sentence length is 37 words. Average word has more than two
syllables.
Flesch Reading Ease scores of
some typical texts
No wonder it’s hard to do
Comics 92
Consumer ads in magazines 82
Movie Screen 75
Seventeen 67
Reader's Digest 65
Sports Illustrated 63
New York Daily News 60
Atlantic Monthly 57
Time 52
Newsweek 50
Wall Street Journal 43
Harvard Business Review 43
New York Times 39
New York Review of Books 35
Harvard Law Review 32
Standard auto insurance policy 10
Internal Revenue Code minus 6
taxes or understand one’s
insurance!
Which One Do I Use?
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Accuracy: The Quick SMOG is for higher grade levels (above 4th
grade). The Flesch grade level ends at grade 12 and does not
differentiate between 12th grade, college level, and graduate level
texts. The Flesch Readability Ease formula is great for all levels
of readers. Therefore: for younger students (grades k-5) use the
Microsoft Word method. For older students, use either Microsoft
Word or Quick SMOG.
Convenience: Choose the most do-able one if time is of the
essence. If you don’t want to type in a text, then Quick SMOG is
very easy. If you are using a text from the web, copy it into
Microsoft Word and use the grammar check method (Flesch grade
level and Flesch Reading Ease). Many student text books are
now available in digital versions, so you can also use that instead
of having to type in a text.
So, do they work?
Flesch’s perspective
I developed the formula in the early 1940s. It measures the average
sentence length in words and the average word length in syllables. You
put these two numbers into an equation and get a number between 0
and 100 that shows you the difficulty of your piece of writing. If it's too
hard to read for your audience, you shorten the words and sentences
until you get the score you want.
At first blush you may think this is a very crude way of dealing with writing.
Writing means conveying ideas from one mind to another. To use a
mechanical gadget for this doesn't seem like an intelligent approach.
But wait a minute. I spent several years of my life doing the underlying
research for this formula and got my Columbia University Ph.D. degree
for it. I can assure you that it is based on some very complicated facts
of human psychology. It works because it is based on the way the
human mind works.
Flesch’s perspective continued
When you read a passage, your eyes and mind focus on successive points
on the page. Each time this happens, you form a tentative judgment of
what the words mean up to that point. Only when you get to a major
punctuation mark-a period, a colon, a paragraph break-does your mind
stop for a split second, sum up what it has taken in so far, and arrive at
a final meaning of the sentence or paragraph. The longer the sentence,
the more ideas your mind has to hold in suspense until its final decision
on what all the words mean together. Longer sentences are more likely
to be complex-more subordinate clauses, more prepositional phrases
and so on. That means more mental work for the reader. So the longer
a sentence, the harder it is to read.
The last little bit of Flesch
Exactly the same thing is true of words. Some words are short and simple,
others are long and complex. The complexity shows up in the prefixes
and suffixes. Take is a simple. short word that doesn't present much
difficulty to a reader. But unmistakably has the prefixes un- and misand the suffixes -able and -ly and gives the mind much more to think
about than take. (My very first readability formula was based on a count
of prefixes and suffices to measure word complexity. A few years later I
tried to make it easier to use and changed to a count of syllables.
Statistically, the results are about the same.)
From:
How to Write Plain English
By Rudolf Flesch
Enough with the propaganda. Does
it REALLY work?
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Think back to what you know about reading
and comprehension.
Now we will do a little experiment using two
texts. Text 1 has a Flesch Reading Ease score
of 25. Text 2 is easier: its Reading Ease score
is 43. After you read each text, you will be
asked to think about your reading experience.
At the end of both, you will be asked to draw
some conclusions.
Text 1
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Text 1 is an extremely difficult text (25 on the
Flesch Reading Ease scale). This is a text that
is appropriate for graduate students.
This excerpt is from the middle of the book, not
the beginning.
Playing with Signs: A Semiotic
Interpretation of Classic Music
Kofi Agawu
If we can assume that the studies by Rosen and Ratner are representative of the range
of methodologies followed by students of Classic music, we can go on to observe that the
specific concern with normative procedures—whether these are treated axiomatically as with
Rosen, or spelled out in the form of formulaic recipes as with Ratner—grows out of the feeling
that the classical style approximates a language “spoken” by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven,
and their contemporaries. Most scholars acknowledge the exemplary and polished nature of this
music, hence the terms “Classic,” “classical,” and “classic,” even where attempts are made to
dispense with the label altogether. The uniformity of intent necessary for this style to attain the
status of a language can therefore be inferred from this characterization. But inference is weaker
than explicit demonstration—hence my reference to a “feeling,” by which I mean a persistent
current that informs these writings in the form of a subtext; it guides the formulation of the
authors’ concepts but it is never made explicit. What is the precise nature and the extent of the
linguistic analogy in writings about Classic music? To answer this question, we need to examine
a few characteristic descriptions of the music.
Descriptions of music in terms of language-based disciplines are commonplace
in the musicological literature. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, rhetoric
provided a useful model for such discourse, and theorists freely borrowed the language and
terminology of rhetoricians. Thus Joachim Burmeister, in his Musica Poetica of 1601,
drew on literary concepts to characterize compositional strategy as a threefold process—
exordium, confirmatio, and conclusio. Johann Mattheson also relied a great deal on
rhetorical terms in characterizing the process of a piece of music. In his Vollkommene
Capellmeister of 1739, Mattheson extended Burmeister’s three-stage model to a six-stage
one as follows: exordium (introduction), narratio (report), propositio (proposal),
confirmatio (corroboration), confutatio (refutation), and peroratio (conclusion). Later in
the century, Heinrich Koch continued, on the one hand, to borrow from rhetoric while, on
the other hand, showing a decisive shift from rhetoric to (or, more accurately, back to)
linguistics, from rhetorical terms to grammatical ones. These trends have continued to the
present day, both informally in music criticism, and more formally in the recent theories of
Allan Keiler, Mario Baroni, David Lidov, and Lerdahl and Jackendoff, among others.
What distinguishes writing about Classic music from that about other music is not
merely a general awareness of the affinities between music and language, but a persistent
concern with a shadowy linguistic analogy at all levels. Is it perhaps the case that Mozart and
Haydn “spoke one language” whereas Brahms and Wagner, Schumann and Chopin, or Bach
and Rameau spoke different languages? Certainly a hasty response to this question might cite
the fact that it is, at least superficially, easier to mistake, for example, Haydn for Mozart (and
vice versa) than it is to mistake Brahms for Wagner, or Rameau for Bach. One might then go
on to cite sociological factors—such as the presence of certain societal uniformity in the late
eighteenth century, which was then overthrown in the nineteenth, leading to a profound
individualization in artistic expression—to support such a viewpoint? Yet our hasty response
will still have left many questions unanswered.
Reflecting on Agawu
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What are the main ideas of this text?
How hard did you find it to read this text?
What helped you/hindered you in your
comprehension?
Text 2
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Text 2 is a less difficult text in terms of
readability. It has a Flesch Reading Ease of 43
(about the same as the Wall Street Journal).
This excerpt is from the beginning of an essay.
Structure, Sign and Play in the
Discourse of the Human Sciences
Jacques Derrida
“We need to interpret interpretations more than to interpret things.” Montaigne
Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that
could be called an “event,” if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is
precisely the function of structural—or structuralist—thought to reduce or to
suspect. Let us speak of an “event,” nevertheless, and let us use quotation marks
to serve as a precaution. What would this event be then? Its exterior form would
be that of a rupture and a redoubling.
It would be easy enough to show that the concept of structure and even the word
“structure” itself are as old as the episteme—that is to say, as old as Western science and
Western philosophy—and that their roots thrust deep into the soil of ordinary language, into
whose deepest recesses the episteme plunges in order to gather them up and to make them
part of itself in a metaphorical displacement. Nevertheless, up to the event which I wish to
mark out and define, structure—or rather the structurality of structure—although it has
always been at work, has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving
it a center or of referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin. The function of this center
was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure—one cannot in fact conceive of an
unorganized structure—but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the
structure would limit what we might call the play of the structure. By orienting and
organizing the coherence of the system, the center of a structure permits the play of its
elements inside the total form. And even today the notion of a structure lacking any center
represents the unthinkable itself.
Nevertheless, the center also closes off the play which it opens up and makes
possible. As center, it is the point at which the substitution of contents, elements, or terms is
no longer possible. At the center, the permutation or the transformation of elements (which
may of course be structures enclosed within a structure) is forbidden. At least this
permutation has always remained interdicted (and I am using this word deliberately). Thus it
has always been thought that the center, which is by definition unique, constituted that very
thing within a structure which while governing the structure, escapes structurality. This is
why classical thought concerning structure could say that the center is, paradoxically, within
the structure and outside it. The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center
does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere.
The center is not the center. The concept of centered structure—although it represents
coherence itself, the condition of the episteme as philosophy or science—is contradictorily
coherent. And as always coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire. The
concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a play based on a fundamental ground, a
play constituted on the basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which
itself is beyond the reach of play.
Had enough?
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What are the main ideas of this text?
How hard did you find it to read this text?
What helped you/hindered you in your
comprehension?
Confessions
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The Agawu text is a whole book on the semiotic
interpretation of music. Semiotics is the study of how
things make meaning. Agawu’s book is one of the
best I have ever read about how music means.
Jacques Derrida is a French philosopher who is best
known for coining the word, “deconstruction.”
Deconstruction uses post-structural linguistics and
psychoanalysis in order to analyze cultural artifacts for
underlying contradictions and constructs.
Your Turn
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What is the utility of readability in the
classroom?
What other factors do you need to take into
account when you are choosing texts for your
students to read?