Assessing Readability

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Assessing Readability
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What is Readability?

• Readability is a way of deciding how hard a text
  is. It is a good idea to know how hard a text is
  before you assign it to be read in a class.
• Readability formulas take into account the length
  of words as well as the length of sentences.

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How to Assess Readability
You can use this readability method on the
handouts you give to make sure they are at an
appropriate level of readability.

• One of the easiest ways to measure readability is
  to use the Flesch Reading Ease formula, which is
  readily available on Microsoft Word.
• Type in approximately 200 words of the text, in
  their original sentence structure.
• Under Tools, go to Options. When the menu
  box appears, click on Spelling and Grammar and
  make sure the Show Readability Statistics
  choice has a checkmark beside it.
• After you have typed in your text and made sure
  the spelling/grammar tool will give you
  readability stats, then do a grammar check on the
  text you have typed in. Ignore everything it
  finds (unless you made a typo).
• At the end of the grammar check, a box will pop
  up with the statistics, including a Reading Ease
  score and an approximate grade level. More
  information will be provided about the Reading
  Ease Score.

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Quick SMOG Method
Total polysyllabic word ct. Approx. grade level (/- 1.5)
0-2 4
3-6 5
7-12 6
13-20 7
31-42 9
43-56 10
57-72 11
73-90 12
91-110 13
111-132 14
133-156 15
157-182 16
183-210 17
211-240 18
Count the number of polysyllabic words in a chain
of 30 sentences and look up the approximate grade
level on this table.
I have no idea what SMOG stands for. I found
this method on the web about four years ago.
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Flesch Reading Ease Information

• The Flesch Reading Ease Scale measures
  readability on a scale of 1-100
• 100 Very easy to read.
• Average sentence length is 12 words or less. No
  words of more than two syllables.
• 65 Plain English.
• Average sentence length is 15 to 20 words.
  Average word has two syllables.
• 0 Extremely difficult to read.
• Average sentence length is 37 words. Average word
  has more than two syllables.

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Flesch Reading Ease scores of some typical texts
No wonder its hard to do taxes or understand
ones insurance!

• Comics 92
• Consumer ads in magazines 82
• Movie Screen 75
• Seventeen 67
• Reader's Digest 65
• Sports Illustrated 63
• New York Daily News 60
• Atlantic Monthly 57
• Time 52
• Newsweek 50
• Wall Street Journal 43
• Harvard Business Review 43
• New York Times 39
• New York Review of Books 35
• Harvard Law Review 32
• Standard auto insurance policy 10
• Internal Revenue Code minus 6

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Which One Do I Use?

• Accuracy The Quick SMOG is for higher grade
  levels (above 4th grade). The Flesch grade level
  ends at grade 12 and does not differentiate
  between 12th grade, college level, and graduate
  level texts. The Flesch Readability Ease
  formula is great for all levels of readers.
  Therefore for younger students (grades k-5) use
  the Microsoft Word method. For older students,
  use either Microsoft Word or Quick SMOG.
• Convenience Choose the most do-able one if time
  is of the essence. If you dont want to type in
  a text, then Quick SMOG is very easy. If you are
  using a text from the web, copy it into Microsoft
  Word and use the grammar check method (Flesch
  grade level and Flesch Reading Ease). Many
  student text books are now available in digital
  versions, so you can also use that instead of
  having to type in a text.

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So, do they work? Fleschs perspective

• I developed the formula in the early 1940s. It
  measures the average sentence length in words and
  the average word length in syllables. You put
  these two numbers into an equation and get a
  number between 0 and 100 that shows you the
  difficulty of your piece of writing. If it's too
  hard to read for your audience, you shorten the
  words and sentences until you get the score you
  want.
•  
• At first blush you may think this is a very crude
  way of dealing with writing. Writing means
  conveying ideas from one mind to another. To use
  a mechanical gadget for this doesn't seem like an
  intelligent approach.
•  
• But wait a minute. I spent several years of my
  life doing the underlying research for this
  formula and got my Columbia University Ph.D.
  degree for it. I can assure you that it is based
  on some very complicated facts of human
  psychology. It works because it is based on the
  way the human mind works.
•  

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Fleschs perspective continued

• When you read a passage, your eyes and mind focus
  on successive points on the page. Each time this
  happens, you form a tentative judgment of what
  the words mean up to that point. Only when you
  get to a major punctuation mark-a period, a
  colon, a paragraph break-does your mind stop for
  a split second, sum up what it has taken in so
  far, and arrive at a final meaning of the
  sentence or paragraph. The longer the sentence,
  the more ideas your mind has to hold in suspense
  until its final decision on what all the words
  mean together. Longer sentences are more likely
  to be complex-more subordinate clauses, more
  prepositional phrases and so on. That means more
  mental work for the reader. So the longer a
  sentence, the harder it is to read.

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The last little bit of Flesch

• Exactly the same thing is true of words. Some
  words are short and simple, others are long and
  complex. The complexity shows up in the prefixes
  and suffixes. Take is a simple. short word that
  doesn't present much difficulty to a reader. But
  unmistakably has the prefixes un- and mis- and
  the suffixes -able and -ly and gives the mind
  much more to think about than take. (My very
  first readability formula was based on a count of
  prefixes and suffices to measure word complexity.
  A few years later I tried to make it easier to
  use and changed to a count of syllables.
  Statistically, the results are about the same.)

From How to Write Plain English   By Rudolf
Flesch
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Enough with the propaganda. Does it REALLY work?

• Think back to what you know about reading and
  comprehension.
• Now we will do a little experiment using two
  texts. Text 1 has a Flesch Reading Ease score of
  25. Text 2 is easier its Reading Ease score is
  43. After you read each text, you will be asked
  to think about your reading experience. At the
  end of both, you will be asked to draw some
  conclusions.

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Text 1

• Text 1 is an extremely difficult text (25 on the
  Flesch Reading Ease scale). This is a text that
  is appropriate for graduate students.
• This excerpt is from the middle of the book, not
  the beginning.

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Playing with Signs A Semiotic Interpretation of
Classic MusicKofi Agawu
If we can assume that the studies by Rosen and
Ratner are representative of the range of
methodologies followed by students of Classic
music, we can go on to observe that the specific
concern with normative procedureswhether these
are treated axiomatically as with Rosen, or
spelled out in the form of formulaic recipes as
with Ratnergrows out of the feeling that the
classical style approximates a language spoken
by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, and their
contemporaries. Most scholars acknowledge the
exemplary and polished nature of this music,
hence the terms Classic, classical, and
classic, even where attempts are made to
dispense with the label altogether. The
uniformity of intent necessary for this style to
attain the status of a language can therefore be
inferred from this characterization. But
inference is weaker than explicit
demonstrationhence my reference to a feeling,
by which I mean a persistent current that informs
these writings in the form of a subtext it
guides the formulation of the authors concepts
but it is never made explicit. What is the
precise nature and the extent of the linguistic
analogy in writings about Classic music? To
answer this question, we need to examine a few
characteristic descriptions of the music.
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Descriptions of music in terms of language-based
disciplines are commonplace in the musicological
literature. In the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, rhetoric provided a useful model for
such discourse, and theorists freely borrowed the
language and terminology of rhetoricians. Thus
Joachim Burmeister, in his Musica Poetica of
1601, drew on literary concepts to characterize
compositional strategy as a threefold
processexordium, confirmatio, and conclusio.
Johann Mattheson also relied a great deal on
rhetorical terms in characterizing the process of
a piece of music. In his Vollkommene
Capellmeister of 1739, Mattheson extended
Burmeisters three-stage model to a six-stage one
as follows exordium (introduction), narratio
(report), propositio (proposal), confirmatio
(corroboration), confutatio (refutation), and
peroratio (conclusion). Later in the century,
Heinrich Koch continued, on the one hand, to
borrow from rhetoric while, on the other hand,
showing a decisive shift from rhetoric to (or,
more accurately, back to) linguistics, from
rhetorical terms to grammatical ones. These
trends have continued to the present day, both
informally in music criticism, and more formally
in the recent theories of Allan Keiler, Mario
Baroni, David Lidov, and Lerdahl and Jackendoff,
among others.
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What distinguishes writing about Classic music
from that about other music is not merely a
general awareness of the affinities between music
and language, but a persistent concern with a
shadowy linguistic analogy at all levels. Is it
perhaps the case that Mozart and Haydn spoke one
language whereas Brahms and Wagner, Schumann and
Chopin, or Bach and Rameau spoke different
languages? Certainly a hasty response to this
question might cite the fact that it is, at least
superficially, easier to mistake, for example,
Haydn for Mozart (and vice versa) than it is to
mistake Brahms for Wagner, or Rameau for Bach.
One might then go on to cite sociological
factorssuch as the presence of certain societal
uniformity in the late eighteenth century, which
was then overthrown in the nineteenth, leading to
a profound individualization in artistic
expressionto support such a viewpoint? Yet our
hasty response will still have left many
questions unanswered.
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Reflecting on Agawu

• What are the main ideas of this text?
• How hard did you find it to read this text?
• What helped you/hindered you in your
  comprehension?

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Text 2

• Text 2 is a less difficult text in terms of
  readability. It has a Flesch Reading Ease of 43
  (about the same as the Wall Street Journal).
• This excerpt is from the beginning of an essay.

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Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the
Human Sciences Jacques Derrida

• We need to interpret interpretations more than
  to interpret things. Montaigne
•  
• Perhaps something has occurred in the history of
  the concept of structure that could be called an
  event, if this loaded word did not entail a
  meaning which it is precisely the function of
  structuralor structuralistthought to reduce or
  to suspect. Let us speak of an event,
  nevertheless, and let us use quotation marks to
  serve as a precaution. What would this event be
  then? Its exterior form would be that of a
  rupture and a redoubling.

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It would be easy enough to show that the concept
of structure and even the word structure itself
are as old as the epistemethat is to say, as old
as Western science and Western philosophyand
that their roots thrust deep into the soil of
ordinary language, into whose deepest recesses
the episteme plunges in order to gather them up
and to make them part of itself in a metaphorical
displacement. Nevertheless, up to the event
which I wish to mark out and define, structureor
rather the structurality of structurealthough it
has always been at work, has always been
neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of
giving it a center or of referring it to a point
of presence, a fixed origin. The function of
this center was not only to orient, balance, and
organize the structureone cannot in fact
conceive of an unorganized structurebut above
all to make sure that the organizing principle of
the structure would limit what we might call the
play of the structure. By orienting and
organizing the coherence of the system, the
center of a structure permits the play of its
elements inside the total form. And even today
the notion of a structure lacking any center
represents the unthinkable itself.
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Nevertheless, the center also closes off the
play which it opens up and makes possible. As
center, it is the point at which the substitution
of contents, elements, or terms is no longer
possible. At the center, the permutation or the
transformation of elements (which may of course
be structures enclosed within a structure) is
forbidden. At least this permutation has always
remained interdicted (and I am using this word
deliberately). Thus it has always been thought
that the center, which is by definition unique,
constituted that very thing within a structure
which while governing the structure, escapes
structurality. This is why classical thought
concerning structure could say that the center
is, paradoxically, within the structure and
outside it. The center is at the center of the
totality, and yet, since the center does not
belong to the totality (is not part of the
totality), the totality has its center elsewhere.
The center is not the center. The concept of
centered structurealthough it represents
coherence itself, the condition of the episteme
as philosophy or scienceis contradictorily
coherent. And as always coherence in
contradiction expresses the force of a desire.
The concept of centered structure is in fact the
concept of a play based on a fundamental ground,
a play constituted on the basis of a fundamental
immobility and a reassuring certitude, which
itself is beyond the reach of play.
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Had enough?

• What are the main ideas of this text?
• How hard did you find it to read this text?
• What helped you/hindered you in your
  comprehension?

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Confessions

• The Agawu text is a whole book on the semiotic
  interpretation of music. Semiotics is the study
  of how things make meaning. Agawus book is one
  of the best I have ever read about how music
  means.
• Jacques Derrida is a French philosopher who is
  best known for coining the word,
  deconstruction. Deconstruction uses
  post-structural linguistics and psychoanalysis in
  order to analyze cultural artifacts for
  underlying contradictions and constructs.

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Your Turn

• What is the utility of readability in the
  classroom?
• What other factors do you need to take into
  account when you are choosing texts for your
  students to read?