Readability

Quoll Writer is able to calculate the following readability indices:

• Flesch Reading Ease
• Flesch-Kincaid Reading Grade Level
• A simplified Gunning Fog index

For all the indices it is important to note that they are a guide only to the readaibility of the text. You should NOT use them to influence your writing or writing style. They are useful, mostly, for determining whether you are targeting the correct audience/age range and/or for providing an indication of whether your writing is more complex than you expect.

Flesch Reading Ease

The Flesch Reading Ease score provides a numerical value on how difficult it is to read the text, the higher the value, the easier the text is to read. The scores map to the following ages:

• 90-100 - Easily understood by an average 11 year old student.
• 60-70 - Easily understood by 13-15 year old students.
• 0-30 - Best understood by university graduates.

Please see the wikipedia page for more details.

Flesch-Kincaid Reading Grade Level

The Flesch-Kincaid Reading Grade Level translates the numerical value given by the Flesch Reading Ease calculation and convert it to a U.S. grade level. Please see the wikipedia page for more details.

The Gunning Fog index

For performance reasons, Quoll Writer implements a simplified version of the Gunning Fog index. To gain an accurate figure the type of 3+ syllable word must be taken into account, for example nouns should be excluded. Quoll Writer does not perform this removal and instead uses a fudge factor to account for the proportion of nouns that may be present in the text. This will lead to a slightly differing index but it should not, in most cases, differ by more than a grade level.

Accessing the readability for a Chapter or the Project

The readability indices are only generated when the associated text contains 100 words or more. There are two ways to access the readability indices:

1. From the word counts.
2. From the readability chart.