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"Hart, Geoff" wrote:
>
> Antóin Ó Slatara wonders: <<Can anyone recommend an automated readability
> tester? We have tried the tool which comes as part of MS Word. Unfortunately
> it doesn't seem very accurate and so I'm on the hunt for an alternative.>>
>
> There is currently no useful*, widely available tool for conducting
> automatic readability assessments; there may be specialized tools being
> developed in university artificial intelligence labs, but I'm not aware of
> any that are available for public consumption. For an example of a good
> study that show why you should distrust readability formulas, see:
> Connatser, B.R. 1999. Last rites for readability formulas in technical
> communication. J. Tech. Writing and Commun. 29(3):271-287.
>
> * Useful = one that correlates strongly with how well and how easily readers
> understand a text.
>
> Want more proof? Take any sentence and run it through a readability formula.
> Now, randomly reorder the words in that sentence or even arrange them in the
> least-comprehensible order you can possibly create and run the readability
> formula again. You'll get exactly the same readability result, even though
> the second sentence is gibberish; if you like torturing software, you can
> probably try the same trick and get the same results with the letters in
> each word randomized, though I confess I haven't tried this. So if you need
> readability statistics that don't have any relationship to comprehension,
> Word's built-in readabilty formulas are every bit as good as anyone else's
> formulas.
Hire a 10 year old child.
--
Peter
Mailto:peternew -at- optonline -dot- net
Adapting old programs to fit new machines
usually means adapting new machines to
behave like old ones.
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