MetaChat - Text Readability Checker

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11 November 2006

Text Readability Checker This is cool, paste in some text and get a score on its readability. →[More:]I've found out that I write to a college level usually. I'm tempted to paste in some of the nonsense comments from MeFi and then respond to those folks with their scores. Would that be bad of me?

post by: fenriq at: 18:18 | 7 comments

That site is cool - it has some excellent cheat sheets on excitingly nerdy things like mod_rewrite and (sigh) regular expressions. I don't know why I love the challenge of regexes, I just do

posted by TheDonF 11 November | 18:39

pretty sure microsoft word will do this, too, fwiw

posted by Wedge 11 November | 18:45

Yeah, it can. IIRC, on Windows it's in File > properties. On the Mac you have to go into Preferences > Spelling + Grammar > Show Readability Statistics

posted by TheDonF 11 November | 19:17

I checked and Word does show some of the stats, but on the mac it does it after a spell check and gives some raw percentages rather than reading levels like the link above.

Both are useful but what I'd really like is a FireFox extension to do this on the fly.

posted by fenriq 11 November | 20:46

I'm assuming "Are you fucking shitting me?" means I broke it.

posted by loquacious 11 November | 22:42

It returns a 5th grade reading level for "Are you fucking shitting me?" and a 67 on the Reading Ease. Pretty hard to misunderstand.

posted by fenriq 11 November | 23:44

It's not hard
Not hard to reach
You can hitch a ride
To Rockaway Beach
Rock Rock Rockaway Beach

Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease: 77
Ideally, web page text should be around the 60 to 80 mark on this scale. The higher the score, the more readable the text.

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 2
Ideally, web page text should be around the 6 to 7 mark on this scale. The lower the score, the more readable the text.

Gunning-Fog Index: 10
Ideally, web page text should be between 11 and 15 on this scale. The lower the score, the more readable the text. (Anything over 22 should be considered the equivalent of post-graduate level text).

posted by jason's_planet 12 November | 01:58

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