Measurement of Readability

[清风出袖]

Do any of you know if there's a free software that can measure the readdablity of a file?Thanks for your comments!

[xujiajin]

MS Word的工具菜单下的选项中有可读性信息，你看对你有没有用？
http://www.corpus4u.org/upload/forum/2005062410432145.jpg

[xujiajin]

请将上图中校对工具上方的“显示可读性统计信息”前的对勾打上。想要具体了解相关的内容可以查一下help里的解释。

[xujiajin]

Links of relevance:
http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/php/flesch-kincaid-function/
http://uuhsc.utah.edu/pated/authors/readability.html

[清风出袖]

谢谢！许家金先生的回复！我知道这个功能可是如何来解释其中的可读性信息呢？而且这其中的一个问题是它和MICROCONCORD计算出的字数不大一样，不知为什么？

[清风出袖]

thanks a lot!but i am not computer genius!i will try to learn to learn something about program compiling sometime. yet how can i interpret the result of the calculation is quite a problem as well for me. i have at hand calculation result out of microsoft word 2003 yet does it mean anything to me, since i am using it to find if there is any statistically significant differences between the complexity of students' English writing performance under different pre-writing activities? if there is a norm against which i can generate somthing out the result? for instance if one students gets 12.6 it means the complexity of his or her writing readability somewhat goes beyond the average senior high of the native speakers or something?

[xiaoz]

I am not sure if there ia any established norm, but think (standardised) TTR, word lenght, sentence length etc are all important indicators of readability. And all of these can be obtained from WordSmtih 3 or 4 Wordlist (statistics). When you can such statistics, use SPSS to compute log-likelihood scores (or chi-square scores), and in cases of very low frequencies, also Fisher's Exact test scores, to see if the diferences between samples are statistically significant. See my posting on statistics for more details.

[清风出袖]

thanks a lot!