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Antóin Ó Slatara wonders: <<Can anyone recommend an automated readability
tester? We have tried the tool which comes as part of MS Word. Unfortunately
it doesn't seem very accurate and so I'm on the hunt for an alternative.>>
There is currently no useful*, widely available tool for conducting
automatic readability assessments; there may be specialized tools being
developed in university artificial intelligence labs, but I'm not aware of
any that are available for public consumption. For an example of a good
study that show why you should distrust readability formulas, see:
Connatser, B.R. 1999. Last rites for readability formulas in technical
communication. J. Tech. Writing and Commun. 29(3):271-287.
* Useful = one that correlates strongly with how well and how easily readers
understand a text.
Want more proof? Take any sentence and run it through a readability formula.
Now, randomly reorder the words in that sentence or even arrange them in the
least-comprehensible order you can possibly create and run the readability
formula again. You'll get exactly the same readability result, even though
the second sentence is gibberish; if you like torturing software, you can
probably try the same trick and get the same results with the letters in
each word randomized, though I confess I haven't tried this. So if you need
readability statistics that don't have any relationship to comprehension,
Word's built-in readabilty formulas are every bit as good as anyone else's
formulas.
--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
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IPCC 01, Oct. 24-27 in Santa Fe. http://ieeepcs.org/2001/
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