{"id":506,"date":"2012-03-16T10:15:17","date_gmt":"2012-03-16T10:15:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/?p=506"},"modified":"2020-07-24T13:31:28","modified_gmt":"2020-07-24T12:31:28","slug":"readability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/2012\/03\/readability\/","title":{"rendered":"Checking Readability in Word"},"content":{"rendered":"

My 5 year old’s school is running a program to help the small folks with learning to read and write. As part of this, the small folks’ parents get weekly meetings with a support teacher to discuss tasks and learning objectives, and the techniques that will help us and the kids to achieve them. It’s relatively painless, very interesting, and I can see a huge improvement in my small person’s reading skills after just 2 weeks, so all good.<\/p>\n

At yesterday’s meeting, the issue of reading ages for different texts came up, which reminded me of a hidden tool in Word that can check the readability of your text.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>To turn on readability checking in Word 2010:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Click File | Options<\/strong>.
    \nThe Word Options<\/em> dialog appears.<\/li>\n
  2. Click Proofing<\/strong>.<\/li>\n
  3. Under When correcting spelling and grammar in Word<\/strong>, select Check grammar with spelling<\/strong>.<\/li>\n
  4. Select Show readability statistics<\/strong>.<\/li>\n
  5. Click OK<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    (If you’re using another version of Word, search for “readability” in the Online Help to get instructions on how to turn this feature on.)<\/p>\n

    Once readability stats are enabled, just run a spelling and grammar check on your documents as usual, and when that’s finished, Word pops up a dialog showing lots of lovely stats on your text.<\/p>\n

    \"Readability<\/a>I’ve illustrated with the results of an analysis on my last blog post (Online Baby-Related Resources<\/a>) .<\/p>\n

    For the Flesch Reading Ease<\/em>, the\u00a0 higher the score, the easier your text is to understand. At the top of the scale, 90-100 should be understood by an 11 year old. A score of 0-30 means that your readers will most likely need a university degree to understand what you’ve written. My article scored 61.7, meaning it should be easily understood by 15-17 year olds. Given the subject matter, that seems like an acceptable lower boundary.<\/p>\n

    The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level<\/em> equates the Flesch Reading Ease<\/em> score to an American school grade (10.1 for my piece).<\/p>\n

    If you’re aiming for a particular reading age, you can go back and tweak your writing as appropriate to achieve an appropriate Readability<\/em> score. The Counts<\/em> and Averages<\/em> stats will give you an idea what to focus on. To get a lower score and increase your audience scope, use simpler vocabulary, and rewrite for shorter sentence length. Keep editing and rechecking till you’ve reached the reading level of your target audience.<\/p>\n

    For more information on how the Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level scores are calculated, and what the results mean, check out this Wikipedia page<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    My 5 year old’s school is running a program to help the small folks with learning to read and write. As part of this, the small folks’ parents get weekly meetings with a support teacher to discuss tasks and learning objectives, and the techniques that will help us and the kids to achieve them. It’s … Continue reading “Checking Readability in Word”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[49],"class_list":["post-506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech-writing","tag-word"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=506"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1490,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506\/revisions\/1490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}