Talk:Readability test

Merging

Should this be Merged with Readability survey?? Eleigh33 19:53, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

I suggest to not merge because a readability survey is an actual survey, while a readability test is a mathematical formula, the most well known of theses is the Flesch-Kincaid. Loserbum3 23:36, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Inaccuracies

There is much on this page that is inaccurate and incomplete. For example, it says the Smog formula has a computerized list. Where does that come from? There may be computerized versions of the Smog formula, but it was written to be applied manually. Also, we should page should be renamed as Readability formulas, because there is so little information about the alternative to the formulas, conducting a "reader survey." You can test a text using real readers, but it is extremely difficult to do because of all the variables for which you must control. Please contact me about making these necessary changes. Bdubay (talk) 02:47, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

'Unreliable' proxy

This phrasing is both POV and amateurish. A prediction of reading difficulty (= readability test) can be correlated to a measure derived from testing actual readers, such as a cloze test. If there is a positive correlation, it might turn out to be anywhere from 0 (zero) to 100% (perfect correlation). Long experience (see Klare reference, and much else in the literature) has shown that the best tests on average predict difficulty significantly better that a human judge. And since the tests can be administered to large quantities of computerised text, the whole process is extremely economical.

What then is the sense of 'unreliable'? It is known that sentence length correlates positively with difficulty of reading, and no-one has ever claimed or even thought that the correlation was perfect. Macdonald-ross (talk) 10:39, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

I love situational irony

From the reading score tests at Joe's Web Tools, the scores for the three paragraphs of this article are:

• Flesch-Kincaid reading ease - 20.2 (0 to 100, higher is best)
• Flesch-Kincaid grade level - 16th grade
• Gunning Fog index - 19.1 (average is 12, lower is best)
• Coleman-Liau index - 17
• SMOG index - 14.1
• automated readability index - 16

StarryGrandma (talk) 19:15, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

External links

A recent edit removed the external links to online readability tools. Most such online tools are click-bait for commercial marketing sites. I have added two links to non-commercial sites. The second, UsingEnglish.com, is on a site supporting teachers of English as a second language. It requires a free membership to use. StarryGrandma (talk) 20:38, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

Other readability resources?

Are there additional readability assessments to address content that includes abbreviations, acronyms? legalese? I've seen this form of writing put through the Flesch-Kincaid Test and then claimed as easy to read. Thank you. SusanHPearsall (talk) 15:01, 6 February 2019 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by SusanHPearsall (talk • contribs) 14:59, 6 February 2019 (UTC)