Readability
If you've come from an education background, you'll know about grading reading books to an age level. This helps teachers give children books for practice reading. They know the child will be able to read and understand the book. It's motivating.
Readability takes this idea and grades any text. Then it gives the likely reading age needed to understand it.
There are studies which question the use of these tools. And they're right.
We're going to use a readability tool to help us to make our writing more clear. We won't worry about the specific reading grade of what we write.
Just for fun, we're going to take a look at the EHC plan pages of 7 Local Offers and see what reading grade they are at.
I used the SEO Tools Readability Checker (opens in a new tab) (opens in a new tab) and chose the Automated Readability Index (ARI). This gives a United States grade level, and I've added the chronological age.
The scores were:
|
Local Offer |
Automated Readability Index (ARI) |
Age |
|
11.7 |
16 to 17 |
|
|
8.2 |
13 to 14 |
|
|
10.5 |
15 to 16 |
|
|
12 |
17 to 18 |
|
|
12 |
17 to 18 |
|
|
7.1 |
12 to 13 |
|
|
6.8 |
11 to 12 |
I don't want you to get too animated by these grade levels.
Remember, the tool was checking a whole webpage.
We want people to read, understand and absorb the information we give them. So we're going to have to be careful what reading level we write at.
Just so you know, this page has an Automated Readability Index (ARI) grade of 3 (age 8 to 9). I hope you found it easy to read. I hope you didn't feel patronised. I really hope you understand what I am saying.
In the rest of this chapter we'll use Dawn, Pop Pop Studio's own plain English checker, to see where we can make a page clearer.
Discussion
Log in to join the discussion. Your comment will be checked before it appears publicly.