As a lover of language I am always interested in various text analysis tools. Today I discovered the world of "readability" tools which calculate how difficult (or easy) a text is to read.

The result is often given in terms of "grade level" of education required (such as "11th grade" or "college" and so on).

At first I was playing at this very handy site with a useful collection of utilities:

Online-Utility.org
All utilities: https://www.online-utility.org/global_index.jsp
English utilities: https://www.online-utility.org/english/

The readability section led me to the following site which lets you calculate the readability level of a text according to a number of different formulas. I learned that there are a number of such systems.

Free Readability Calculators and Text Tools
Use one or more of our FREE readability calculators to automatically get the grade level of your text.
http://www.readabilityformulas.com/free-readability-calculators.php

The first item on the list is probably the most useful because it processes your text through 7 different formulas in one go.

1) Text Readability Consensus Calculator:
Our free readability tool processes your text through 7 popular readability formulas! The tool will give you a consensus on grade level, reading difficulty, and age of readers. Use this tool to score any type of text for any age group.

Another page lists the tools broken down by the various formulas used. A Wikipedia search will tell about the various formulas themselves. ( Popular readability formulas ).

Readability by Formula
http://www.readabilityformulas.com/search/pages/Free_Readability_Calculators/

Now have some fun and check the readability of various articles linked in RMN posts!

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