A good essay writer should keep it plain and simple. And always remember – brevity is the soul of excellent academic writing. Thanks to that, your text will be readable. These are the things teachers keep saying to students all the time, aren’t they? But what does “readable” even mean? You’ll be lucky if they find a minute to explain it. And worse still, swamped by all assignments coming from all sides, you might not have time to figure out this stuff on your own.
Well, here’s the good news: the EssaysWriter free online readability checker is meant to make completing your writing tasks easier and faster. This is achieved through analyzing and scoring your texts’ readability with several different indexes, which provides you with actionable insights on which instances need improvements. As a result, our tool will help you make your content easily readable and clearly understandable, even if it is a Master’s degree-level piece about a complex philosophical concept.
Read on and learn how you can turn abstruse and vague wording into sharp and lucid texts.
Readability is an essential characteristic for virtually any type of written content, be it an academic paper or a marketing copy. Checking your text for grammar and spelling mistakes and fixing them is mandatory, but it’s nearly not enough to make it readable. But why is that so important?
When crafting an essay on any topic, your main mission is to convey your thoughts and ideas on a subject matter. Teachers might even overlook certain grammatical and punctuation mistakes, but they will never turn a blind eye to the vaguely written, hard-to-understand text. This can knock down the grade more significantly than any structural flaw. That’s why performing a readability check every time before you submit a paper is a must. And that’s where the EssaysWriter text readability analyzer will come in extremely handy. It will empower you to edit your texts to make them clearly understandable, avoid misinterpretations, and relieve readers of the necessity to re-read sentences again and again.
Apart from student papers, readability is absolutely crucial for business-related and online content. In the first case, particularly in marketing, high readability is meant to deliver the necessary message, improve readers’ engagement, and, eventually, turn them into clients. Apparently, a writing readability checker can also be effectively used in business correspondence – to make communication concise and crystal clear. In the second case, great readability helps provide readers with the right information and lets them grasp it quickly and effortlessly. As a result, it can keep users on your website despite their notoriously short attention spans.
So, whether you are a student, a professional content creator, or a communication expert, running a content readability check is something you definitely want to do every time you’re going to put your text out there.
As a matter of fact, using our content and essay readability checker is as simple as it only gets. You just need to paste the text you want to check into the box at the top of the screen. And basically, that’s it. The utility will process the provided content and analyze its multiple components and qualitative attributes. As a result, almost instantly, the tool will display the result – six readability indexes based on different evaluation techniques. Yet, their shared and only mission is to indicate to which degree your content is or isn’t easy to read and understand by readers.
Before we move on to the scores themselves, we’d like to mention that there’s a widely-spread misinterpretation of the readability concept. Many people think that any “readable” text should be as simple as it gets and understandable by a 6-year-old. That’s absolutely wrong! Readability is all about making content easier and seamless to consume by the target audience, be it high schoolers or experienced full-stack developers.
Now that we’ve established readability’s main principle, let’s break down how each of the indexes our readability score checker provides is estimated and what they are meant to demonstrate about your text in the first place.
The algorithm-based readability index is a score that helps assess the general complexity of a text. To determine this score, we use multiple tests, including the Flesch-Kincaid and SMOG tests, and also the Coleman-Liau and Gunning-Fog indexes.
The SMOG score is an important part of evaluating the aggregate result. It was created by clinical psychologist Harry McLaughlin in the second half of the 20th century and is to this day considered the gold standard for readability calculation. The SMOG score provides an meticulous estimation of a content’s complexity thanks to several algorithmic calculations. First off, we need to choose 30 sentences in the text (10 in the beginning, 10 in the middle, 10 in the end) and count words all the words that have three or more syllables in them. After that, we take the square root of the received number and add 3 to the obtained score. The number you get is the reading grade level. FYI: college and university freshmen students typically read somewhere around a 12-13 grade reading level.
The Gunning-Fog index is another useful indicator for assessing the English text’s complexity. This score estimates how many years of academic education a reader needs to adequately perceive your text. For example, if you want to communicate with college freshmen, the score of your text should not go over 14 (out of 17). The formula for the Gunning-Fog index takes into account the sum of the average sentence length and the percentage of multi-syllable words in a text multiplied by 0.4.
The next indicator to measure the text’s readability is the Coleman-Liau index. Much like the previous scores, it is used to detect the formal grade level required to comprehend a text. However, the calculation principle is different, as this index takes into account the overall amount of characters in a word instead of the number of its syllables. This approach helps achieve higher accuracy in assessing a text’s complexity. When used together with other readability assessment scores, the Coleman-Liau index gives a well-defined estimate of a text’s complexity compliant with the grade level (for example, a score of 14 is roughly appropriate for a second-year undergraduate). Its formula is quite complex and better suits for machine-performed scoring.
The Flesch-Kincaid readability score is another vital component of our automated readability index. This score is derived from two measures – Ease and Grade Level, which are inversely correlated. This means the lower the Grade Level score is, the higher the Reading Ease score would be. The algorithm uses the total words, total syllables, and total sentences to calculate these measures. Then, it factors them into our overall assessment of a text’s readability. Commonly, if your target audience is second-year college students, you should aim for an Ease score not lower than 40 and a Grade Level not higher than 13-14.
Based on several most efficient and sophisticated indicators, the EssaysWriter readability improvement tool basically indicates how educated a reader should be to understand your text. But what exactly can you do to boost your content’s smoothness and clarity? We’ve prepared 13 practical tips for you to follow:
Our readability checker is meant to improve your writing and make it easier to comprehend for future readers. In academic writing, this might be the nuance that will help you make the grade. In the workplace, this could be critical to your professional success. Use our free tool to your utmost advantage, and always remember the rule of thumb: if it’s complex, make it simple!
