The Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test is supposed to measure the readability of a text document and the level of education a person should need to comprehend it. You can
download it here.
Quote:
The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level is an index that gives the years of education required to comprehend a document. For example, a document with a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score of 10 would require that a reader have about 10 years (or a 10th grade level) of education to comprehend the document. It can be calculated using the following equation:
(0.39 × Average Sentence Length) + (11.8 × Average Syllables per Word) - 15.59
The Flesch Reading Ease Score indicates on a scale of 0 to 100 the difficulty of comprehending a document. A score of 100 indicates an extremely simple document, while a score of 0 would describe a very complex document. A Flesch Reading Ease Score in the range of 40–50 would correspond to a relatively complex document that might score a 12 as its Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level. The Flesch Reading Ease Score can be calculated by using the following equation:
206.835 - (1.015 × Average Sentence Length) - 84.6 × Average Syllables per Word
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I thought it would be fun to apply some
threads to the test.
It's very easy to use. After downloading the zip file to your desktop, extract the contents and you will be able to open the application. You must copy and paste the text of a thread to a word document and save it before you can open that document with
Flesh and receive your results (or you can click the drop menu 'Thread Tools' at the top of the page of a thread and select 'Download this Thread' to save a full simple text version directly to your computer, which is the better option).
The test gauges the document by the following equation:
Here are the score ranges and the corresponding understandability...
Quote:
90.0–100.0 - easily understandable by an average 11-year-old student
60.0–70.0 - easily understandable by 13- to 15-year-old students
0.0–30.0 - best understood by university graduates
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Let's take for our first example, the infamous
Censorship by mob rule by Angakuk (chosen for length, not content). Here are our overall results:
What about
The Department of Positive Out of Body Experiences by Tim Brewer?
Our results:
Not to limit us to
threads only, I decided I would test the complete text of
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The results:
The results are questionable and I am unsure how truly accurate the test is. Interesting though, no? I thought so.