Online Readability Checker Tool
What It Is and How It Works
This is an online tool that checks your texts for readability so you can make sure that your readers understand you and your paper is easy to read. To calculate readability, this online checker uses several tests. Each test analyzes a certain aspect of the paper. You can see results of all the tests as the system of scores. To obtain the final score, the program takes into account such information as the structure of sentences and syllables as well as how many times any word was used. To start the readability test, you only need to paste your content in the box. Your results will be calculated in just a few seconds.
Are You Ready to Know Your Readability Index?
If you want to deliver a clear message to your audience, you have to create a proper perception. To do this, you have to understand your audience and its demands. ARI (Automated Readability Index) is a test for readability. It will help you understand which social group will find your text most attractive or interesting. This test suggests the grade level required for the best understanding of the text, presenting its results in a form of scores. To obtain this information, algorithms calculate the average level of difficulty and the number of words. It also calculates the number of characters for each particular word. The rounded up score corresponds to the certain age of readers.
Your Level of Education (SMOG)
SMOG stands for Simple Measure of Gobbledygook. This index is displayed in the form of grades. It shows what education your readers must have to understand your thoughts and the structure of the text. Many people agree that the accuracy and the ease of use of this test are higher than of the others readability tests. To obtain the index, the number of words with a certain number of syllables is calculated for every group of ten sentences. After this, the formula calculates the square root of this number and sums it with 3. This is the SMOG Grade Index.
Hit Your Targeted Audience: the Gunning Fog Index
This is another readability test. It suggests what education your readers must have to get a grasp on your text from the first time they read it. The Gunning Fog index was invented by an American businessman Robert Gunning. He noticed that newspaper often contain a lot of unnecessary words that increase the complexity of the text and so have a negative impact on the readability. He named these words “fog” and created a formula to calculate the Fog Index. This formula calculates the average length of sentences and the number of long words for every 100 words, excluding only certain stop-words, such as proper nouns, popular suffixes, and common words. This formula doesn’t take into account that fact that some long words may be easy to understand, and vice versa.
The Coleman Liau Index
This is another test that evaluates the readability level according to the US grade system. For example, if an audience reads a text with the Coleman Liau index equal to 12.4, people from the audience must have at least 12th grade. This value is calculated automatically, taking into account the number of characters in words only, i.e. it ignores syllables. In this case, the obtained number is easier to analyze because it represents the actual number of letters in words.
The Flesch-Kincaid Ease
This test will help you find out whether your readers understand your content properly. Results are displayed as a number that ranges from 0 to 100. Higher numbers mean the better readability of the text. In this case, the program calculates both the number of words in each sentence and the number of syllables in every word. The average reader will easily understand a text with the score equal to about 60-80 points.
Flesch-Kincaid Level Index
This test, just like many others, focuses on the grade level required to understand a paper. It is similar to the Flesch-Kincaid Ease because it also considers the length of sentences and words. The latter parameter is calculated in syllables. The Flesch-Kincaid Level Index, however, works in the opposite way. Usually, results of these two tests demonstrate an inverse relationship. This test will be especially useful for those who work in the field of education.