This has a direct impact on the extent people engage with and take on your message.Ĭontent with a higher engagement rate has many benefits, including: Readability scores can give you valuable insights into how easy your text is to understand.
The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level is equivalent to the US grade level of education. This translates the score into a grade level. To make sense of a Reading Ease score, a conversion table is needed. Note that this differs from the majority of readability scores where a lower score is easier.įor example, a reading score of 60 to 70 is equivalent to a grade level of 8-9 so a text with this score should be understood by 13 to 15-year-olds. The higher the reading score, the easier a piece of text is to read. They are both calculated with the same units, but the weightings for these units are different between the two tests, resulting in different readability scores. The Flesch Reading Ease score is between 1 and 100, and the Flesch Kincaid Grade Level reflects the US education system. What do the Flesch scores mean?īoth Flesch scores reflect how readable a piece of content is. For example, “it was a lackadaisical attempt” is more difficult to read than “it was a lazy attempt”. Similarly, words that contain a lot of syllables are harder to read than words that use fewer syllables. We no longer have the tolerance for lengthy, meandering prose. However, because the average length of a sentence has decreased with time, so has our attention span. You could have a long paragraph which was one long sentence strings of clauses connected with peppered semicolons were the norm. During this time, the average sentence was a lot longer than it is now. Many of the classics of English Literature were written in the 18th and 19th centuries. Sentences that contain a lot of words are more difficult to follow than shorter sentences. As judged by the average number of syllables in a word As judged by the average number of words in a sentence But, the building bricks that make up both Flesch scores are straightforward and based on two factors:
The mathematical formula underlying the two tests look like this:Īt first glance, the formulas for the readability scores may not seem to make sense. How do Flesch tests work?įlesch readability tests work by taking into account sentence and word counts. Even if they’re an advanced reader, it means the content is less time-consuming to read. If a text has a Flesch Kincaid level of 8, this means the reader needs a grade 8 level of reading or above to understand it. Now it’s used for a much wider variety of applications.
#Flesch–kincaid readability tests word for mac manuals
The Navy utilised it for their technical manuals used in training. The amended version was developed in the 1970s to make it easier to use. Previously, the Flesch Reading Ease score had to be converted via a table to translate to the reading grade level. It was developed by the US Navy who worked with the Flesch Reading Ease. The Flesch Kincaid Grade Level is a widely used readability formula which assesses the approximate reading grade level of a text. All use it to help them assess the ease by which a piece of text will be understood and engaged with. Now, over 70 years later, the Flesch Reading Ease is used by marketers, research communicators and policy writers, amongst many others. He was a consultant with the Associated Press, developing methods for improving the readability of newspapers. The formula was developed in the 1940s by Rudolf Flesch. This means text should be fairly easy for the average adult to read. Scoring between 70 to 80 is equivalent to school grade level 8. The Flesch Reading Ease gives a text a score between 1 and 100, with 100 being the highest readability score.
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