FW: Readability tester?

[david -dot- locke -at- amd -dot- com]

I'm going to agree with Steve here. 

I've used reability scores about twelve years ago. I don't remember which
software package I used, but one measure was strength score. It worked. You
could take raw SME text and get a low score, and have a high score after
your edits. The only thing I used this for was to determine when to stop
editing. An 85% score was high enough. Now, some E.B. White style writing
wouldn't have gotten a good score, because the calculations didn't see
clauses as a good thing. Perfectly great writing wouldn't have gotten a good
score. But, the calculations were not created to grade perfectly great
writing. 

There was also something called Corporate Voice. You could feed it some text
as a template. It would analyze the grammar. Then, it would take another
piece of text and tell you how different they were in terms of things like
passive voice and sentence structure. This application worked great, but it
was limited to something like 200 paragraphs. If there is a new version out
there I'd like to know about it. 

These things are tools. They are not writers.

David


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