Different Readability Formulas and How to Use Them

Writing good essays is crucial whether you are a college student or a professional employee. One of the many prominent features of a good essay is making sure that your texts are easy for comprehending and understanding. This will enable your audience to recognize your message, stay engaged, and enjoy reading your text, regardless of its type.

Readability of an essay or paper by definition is the ease with which a reader can understand a certain text. There are a lot of features that can affect how readable a certain paper or essay is. These will include the type of words, length of sentences, in addition to format and layout of your whole text.

The purpose of a readability test is to analyze how complex written texts are. This is why using readability formulas is crucial whether you are working on an academic or professional text.

How to Determine the Reading Level:

Using different readability formulas to analyze your writing, you can decide on a certain text. It will highlight problematic areas in your writing to help you improve it and make it more understandable.

There are different readability tests that you can run. These tools are very helpful for people who are writing for academic and professional purposes. They also help you in identifying your pattern so you can avoid such common mistakes in future essays or papers.

What are Different Readability Formulas?

Readability formulas determine how difficult your text is by analyzing a sample of it. These formulas measure an average word length, how many syllables there are and an average sentence length to determine how easy your text is.

These formulas provide a useful readability level indicator. By looking at this indicator, you can determine whether your text is readable or not. It also determines this text’s grade level, so you can make sure that it is appropriate for your audience. For example, you can look will enable your readers to stay more focused on your topic.

There are different readability formulas that people can use for determining how understandable your text is:

1.     Flesch Reading Ease:

The formula is: 206.835 – 1.015 (total words/total sentences) – 84.6 (total syllables/ total words)

2.     Flesch–Kincaid:

The formula is: 0.39 (total words/total sentences) +11.8 (total syllables/ total words) + 15.59

3.     Gunning Fog Index:

The formula is: 0.4 [(words/sentences) +100 (complex words/words)]

4.     SMOG Readability:

This is another indicator that uses a reading level calculator to determine how difficult a certain text is. It was typically used for checking health messages but can be used to determine how readable it is if comparing with other types of writing.

For calculating using this formula you need:

1. Count a total of 30 sentences.
2. Then you should look through the group of sentences and evaluate how many words with three or more syllables, even if the words repeat.
3. When you have calculated all the words needed, provide a conversion table to calculate the grade. A 7.4 score means that the essay is appropriate for a 7th or 8th-grade student.

    5. The FRY Readability:

This is a graph-based test that is used for testing academic materials from elementary level to college level. The test depends on the fact that as we grow older, our vocabulary continues to grow.

Your steps for calculating using this formula:

1. Choose 3 samples of 100-word passages randomly.
2. Count the number of sentences and estimate the fraction of the last sentence to the nearest 1/10th.
3. Count the number of syllables and make a table of the number of sentences and syllables for the 3 different samples.
4. Now you have average sentence length and the number of syllables. Draw a dot where the 2 lines meet to find the area in the graph which corresponds to the readability level.

6.     Coleman-Liau Index:

Just like other readability formulas, this one is used to help readers determine how easy it is to comprehend a certain piece of writing. However, this readability index is a bit different from others as it depends on characters rather than syllables to assess and evaluate a certain text.

The readability formula is calculated this way: CLI = 0.0588L- 0.296S- 15.8

Where L is an average number of letters per 100 words and S is the average number of sentences per 100 words. A 10.6-grade text is appropriate for a 10th grader while a 14.5 grade is appropriate for an undergraduate.

7.     Dale–Chall Readability Formula:

This test relies on a table that is made up of 3000 words. These words are considered readable by any fourth-grade student. Any word that doesn’t exist in this table is considered rather difficult. The number of difficult words is then entered in a readability formula to find a score.

This is the formula: 0.1579 (difficult words/words x100) + 0.0496 (words/ sentences)

A high score means that this text is difficult to read.

RobotDon Readability Checker Tool

Readability checker helps every student to find out whether the essay is easy to read and understand. We use a great number of readability formulas to calculate the readability score correctly. Our primary method is Flesch Reading Ease which shows the index of your writing quality.  

The basic readability synonym refers to writing’s quality. A text that is easy to read will deliver the message and gain audience’s attention. This is why RobotDon Essay Checker Tool is considered to be extremely useful for people who want to improve their academic and professional writing’s quality. This tool uses 2 readability formulas; the Flesch Reading Ease and SMOG Readability. These 2 formulas are going to help you assess how difficult your essay or paper is. A machine is smart and will not make the mistakes that a human might do while checking your text.

This tool is very easy to use. A smart machine analyzes your writing and helps you find your essay score. Now you can improve your writing’s quality by enhancing your vocabulary. This amazing tool is also going to help you develop thinking abilities to improve your writing’s structure. With the provided tips, you can easily edit your essay and paper. If you still have doubts about your paper, ask professional essay editors to help.

Thanks to this amazing tool, essay writing will be easier and more fun. This is a great tool that can help you improve your grades and achieve success.