I’ve been working through Google Docs lately and noticed that with the Word Count feature comes a number of readability index values:
The Flesch-Reading Ease value can be between 1 and 100, the higher the value the easier the content is to read. The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level and Automated Readability Index are representative of the grade level required to be able to read the content.
My question is, how important is the reading level? The values for the current short story I’m working on are 91.17, 2.0 and 3.0 respectively. The novel I am working is at 80.44, 4.0 and 4.0. Should I be aiming for a more advanced reading level, is grade five the standard for universality.
I did some research and it seems that the top selling authors are at the 80% level. From what I’ve been gathering everywhere these are the average values that the best selling authors are falling under:
- No more than 4.25 characters per word
- No more than 5% passive voice
- No less than an 80% readability on the Flesch Reading Ease scale
- A Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of 5
The following article explains how sentence structure can affect the readability index.
1 response so far ↓
JayT // November 14, 2008 at 5:02 pm
There’s a cool online tool that provides over a dozen readability tests on your work…which can be handy since each readability test is designed for a different type of document. It includes tests that are appropriate for children’s books, for technical works, for books targeting second-language speakers, etc.
As well as readability test results, it also shows you which words and/or sentences are more difficult to read. So editing is easy because I know where to target.
Anyway, you can check it out at AutoCrit.com. Hope this is useful