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Readability is a measure of the accessibility of a piece of writing, indicating how wide an audience it will reach.

Readability depends principally on how easy it is to understand. Presentation factors unrelated to the language of the text also affect readability, for example choice of typeface, text size, layout and colours.

Readability formulas give a rough indication of a passage's readability. They generate a score based on word length (which is a proxy for semantic difficulty) and sentence length (which is a proxy for syntactic complexity). Scores are compared with scales based on judged linguistic difficulty or reading grade level. Many readability formulas measure word length in syllables rather than letters, but only SMOG has a computerized readability program incorporating an accurate Syllable Counter. Since readability tests do not factor in meaning, they should not be considered definitive measures of readability. Certain word processing programs have some of these formulas built in.

Some readability tests for English are:

• SMOG (Simple Measure Of Gobbledygook)
• Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
• Fry Readability Formula
• Automated Readability Index (ARI)
• Coleman-Liau Index
• Gunning-Fog Index
• Raygor Estimate Graph
• Linsear Write

[edit] External links

• 70-page pdf file reviewing research on readability formulas
• Online SMOG calculator
• Readability Scores for Web pages and MS Word files
• GNU Style and Diction Command line programs to calculate score

nl:Leesbaarheid ru:Читабельность simple:Textual difficulty de:Lesbarkeit

This page uses content from the English-language version of Wikipedia. The original article was at Readability test. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with Psychology Wiki, the text of Wikipedia is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.