A calculator to tell you how readable your writing is

How readable is what you write? Readers can tell you. Your editor can tell you. You should be able to tell yourself, especially if you read what you’ve written out loud.

But what if a machine could tell you?

The PR Daily website points out a tool-slash-toy called the Readability Calculator.

“The measure of readability used here is the indication of number of years of education that a person needs to be able to understand the text easily on the first reading,” reads the calculator’s introduction on the Online-Utilities.com site. “Your writing will score better when you: use simpler diction, write short sentences.”

I plugged that introductory paragraph into the tool and it told me the approximate U.S. grade level needed to comprehend it ranges from 10th to 12th, according to the various scales the tool uses.

It sounds silly, and it’s kind of a toy. I plugged in the lyrics of the Tom Waits song “Time” and the tool calculated the number of years of formal education a person would require to easily understand the text on the first reading as 56.45. When I added some punctuation, though, the number fell to 7.91.

A reminder of the importance of punctuation. It can take decades off the amount of schooling needed to understand what you’re trying to say.

But time-wasting fun aside, the tool is also reasonably accurate. I plugged several examples of my own writing into it and it mostly said the U.S. grade level needed to understand them was between seventh and 10th. But when I was writing about more complex subjects, the number crept up to 12 or 13.

I put the first three paragraphs of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” into the tool and it calculated the grade level needed to understand it as fourth to seventh, which sounds about right to me.

The calculator looks at the number of characters and even syllables per word and the number of words per sentence. It even pulls out sentences it thinks you could rewrite to improve their readability, and while the introduction says it offers suggestions, I didn’t find that.

It’s not a substitute for your own judgment or a good editor, but it’s a handy and fun little gadget that might act as a second set of eyes on your writing and help you improve it just a bit.

I’m going to use it a little bit. I have a feeling that suggested sentences to improve feature can be very useful. Let me know if you use it and whether it helps.

Note: I plugged everything in this post above this paragraph into the calculator. Here are the results (click to enlarge):

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Photo: Wikipedia