Readability reports
What is readability?
Readability refers to how easy text is to read and understand. The readability of a document depends on a range of factors, including content, structure, style, and layout and design.
Why worry about reading ease?
The average reading age in the UK is about 13 (according to data from the National Literacy Trust website), so if you’re writing for the public, it's important to tailor public information to this level if you want most people to understand it. Of course, it's important too to treat the audience with respect: more on this below.
We can assess the readability of any text – printed or electronic. Maybe you’d like to check that your own organization’s document is pitched at the right level. Or maybe it’s your job to monitor other individuals’ or organizations’ writing and you’d like an objective assessment from language experts.
What will you provide?
We will use specialist software to calculate the reading level of your text, and identify any problem areas. We’ll explain clearly what we’ve done and why, and what the results mean.
We recognize that computerized tests have shortcomings. For example, they ignore aspects of readability such as use of appropriate headings, logical argument, lack of ambiguity, good grammar and good punctuation. As Martin Cutts notes in Writing by numbers: ‘Assessing a document’s clarity on test results alone is therefore likely to be misleading.’
Discussion groups and one-to-one interviews are better than readability testing alone for assessing clarity, but are usually feasible only where cost and speed don’t matter. As Martin observes: ‘This means that in deciding whether a document is at an appropriate level for its audience, editorial judgment based on experience will be the best aid.’ And that’s exactly what we offer you to accompany the software results: a qualitative expert assessment of your document, highlighting its strengths and weaknesses.
My document contains technical terms – will these affect your report?
For the computerized scores, yes: it’s an inevitable shortcoming of software. But our qualitative assessment is more sophisticated.
We believe it’s often a good thing to include technical terms in documents for the public, so long as you explain them well. And if you’re writing for members of a profession or other group, technical terms are valuable shorthand, allowing you to express specialist concepts concisely.
How much will it cost?
It’s hard to give set prices for readability reports in the way we do for our editing and accreditation services, as the cost depends not only on the size of your document but also on:
- its format (for example, Word documents are easier to test than PDFs)
- the type of document it is
- your needs: what you will plan to use the report for, and so the type of information you’d find most useful. For example, we can focus on particular areas of the text, or aspects of language. We can even provide a comment from our research director if, for example, you’d like this for a press release or other publicity.
Please contact us if you’d like a quotation – we believe you’ll be pleasantly surprised by our charges for this rare and specialist service.