readability
People have defined readability in various ways, e.g., in: The Literacy Dictionary, Jeanne Chall and Edgar Dale, G. Harry McLaughlin, William DuBay.
Easy reading helps learning and enjoyment, so what we write should be easy to understand.
While many writers and speakers since ancient times have used plain language, the 20th century brought more focus to reading ease. Much research has focused on matching prose to reading skills. This has used many successful formulas: in research, government, teaching, publishing, the military, medicine, and business. Many people in many languages have been helped by this.
By the year 2000, there were over 1,000 studies on readability formulas in professional journals about their validity and merit. The study of reading is not just in teaching. Research has shown that much money is wasted by companies in making texts hard for the average reader to read.
There are summaries of this research; see the links in this section. Many textbooks on reading include pointers to readability.
— Readability: Definition, Wikipedia
This project measures readability in text with several formulas: Dale–Chall, Automated Readability, Coleman–Liau, Flesch, Gunning fog, SMOG, and Spache.
You can edit the text above, or pick a template: .
You can choose which target age you want to reach (now at ), and text will be highlighted in green if the text matches that (albeit if they’re still in school). Red means it would take 6 years longer in school (so an age of 18), and the years between them mix gradually between green and red.
You can pick which average to use (currently ).
It’s now highlighting per, but you can change that.