Red Marker offers rules that will assess the reading age of your document. This allows your organization to stay compliant with reading age regulations, or can help you to simplify your content when necessary.
What is Readability Level?
The "Readability Level," or "Reader Age," of a document refers to the ease in which a document can be read. A number of factors can go into assigning a readability level such as font choices, spacing, word usage, sentence formation, etc.
What Readability methods does Red Marker offer?
Flesch-Kincaid (most common)
Designed to analyze the entire document based upon the number of words per sentence and average number of syllables per word.
The document is given in a grade level format, e.g. "sixth grade level of readability."
SMOG
Designed to analyze documents based upon how many words have three or more syllables.
Most accurate on documents with more than 30 sentences as it typically analyzes 10 sentences near the beginning of the document, 10 near the middle, and 10 near the end.
The document is assigned a readability "grade level" from 5 to 18, with 5 being the easiest (e.g. kindergarten level), and 18 being the hardest (e.g. 12th grade or higher).
FRY
Designed to analyze three blocks of text with 100 words each, focusing on the number of words per sentence and the average number of syllables per word.
The document is given a score on a 1 to 100 scale with the easiest readability/lowest reader age being 100 and most difficult being 1.
How are results displayed?
Results will be displayed as a total readability score for the entire document. There is also an option to have sentences with the "highest reading level" highlighted. This will help you to identify the complex sentences for further refinement and to improve the readability of the document.
What does "highest reading level" mean?
Highest reading level means sentences that are at least 3 grades higher than the average reading age of the overall document. For example, if the overall grade of the document is fifth grade, Red Marker can highlight up to 10 sentences that are at least 8th grade or above. It will focus on those with the highest level first (e.g. if there are sentences over 12th grade reader age it will highlight these first).
Can we add specific exclusion terms?
While this can be done in certain circumstances, it is determined on a case by case basis. Currently we exclude URLs from the readability calculations.
How do I use Red Marker's Readability Scores?
Red Marker Readability scores are displayed like a traditional Red Marker rule / risk flag in the rule pane on the right side of your document. If high reading level sentences are being evaluated, these will be highlighted for your convenient review.
How is Red Marker's Readability score different from the Microsoft Word Readability score?
Red Marker offers multiple Readability methods for assessing your document readability, where Microsoft only offers Flesch-Kincaid.
Red Marker's Flesch-Kincaid score takes Readability one step further by excluding URLs (which drive up a readability score unnecessarily). Red Marker also incorporates headings into sentence segmentation calulations by intelligently identifying when a heading does not end in a full stop and treats this as its own sentence. Red Marker does not include headers and footers in the score calculation, as this content is generally intentionally segregated from body text due to it being more complex.