Luxfield Text Grading and Editing Services
CADET: readability grading basics
Luxfield Editing makes use of a specially developed software package called CADET. This provides help with three main editing tasks - vocabulary monitoring, usage monitoring, and readability --text complexity-- checking (this section).
Readability checking:
What is computer-based readability checking, and does it really work?
Readability (more sensibly, text complexity) checking and grading is a way of comparing the match --or non-match-- of the superficial linguistic features (e.g. word length, sentence length, etc) of a text to those of texts known to be comprehensible to the target readership.
If the results seem close, where superficial linguistic features are concerned, at least, it is assumed that anyone used to reading texts of that sort will not find this one unusual or surprisingly difficult (in other words, the reader will not find the sentences unusually long for his or her level of ability, or filled with an unusually large number of unusually long words).
To go further and say that is sufficient to assume the text will actually be comprehensible to the reader is, according to most researchers, going one step too far. Other factors need to be taken into consideration.
Two things make readability checking a possibly useful editorial tool. One is that a bad-match between the text being checked and texts known to be suitable will often indicate that the text is too complex (therefore very likely too difficult) or too simple (and so probably insufficiently challenging) for the readership.
In other words, the technique is more certain as an identifier of bad matches, than good ones. Bad news can be useful.
In fact this is hardly any different to medical diagnostics: a bad match between temperature or blood pressure measurements and the normal is something that must be acted upon; a 'good' match need not be completely reassuring.
Another important thing to consider about computer-based readability checking is the objectivity of the technique. Taking reliable (i.e. reconfirmable) measurements in a purely mechanical way avoids problems of personal subjectivity.
The point is not that arguments can be avoided about whether texts are 'readable' or not, but that consistency of textual style (or at least of the level of linguistic complexity in a text) can be maintained over long stretches of text, and over long periods of time. This can be quite useful, for example, in the collating of anthologies of texts demanding a roughly similar level of language ability, or where a graded texts series is gradually enlarged over a period of years.
CADET software measures word-length (by counting letters and counting syllables) and sentence length (by counting the number of words in any sentence) over the entire length of any text.
This information obtained from this is displayed in the following formats:
- Data lists - a simple numerical report of the findings, with some averaging calculations.
- 'Sky-line' displays: showing the results of standard text-complexity formulae (Fog, Flesch, ARI) for all possible 100-word samples from beginning to end of the text, presented on a scrollable horizontal bar-chart display