Textual difficulty facts for kids
Textual difficulty is all about how easy or hard a piece of writing is to understand. Think about it like this: some books are super easy to read, while others make your brain work really hard! Scientists have found two main things that make a text easy or hard to read.
- Word difficulty: This is about the words themselves. Some words are rare and tricky, while others are common and easy. Usually, longer words are harder to understand than shorter ones.
- Sentence difficulty: This is about how sentences are put together. Long, complicated sentences can be confusing. Short, simple sentences are much easier to follow.
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How We Predict Readability
A readability test is like a special tool that measures how easy a text is to read. These tests try to guess how hard readers will find a certain piece of writing. They do this by looking at those two main things we just talked about: word difficulty and sentence difficulty.
How Hard Are the Words?
To figure out how hard the words are, readability tests often look at vocabulary lists or how long the words are.
Back in 1923, two people named Bertha A. Lively and Sidney L. Pressey created one of the first ways to measure reading ease. They were worried that science textbooks for middle school had too many hard, technical words. They thought teachers spent all their time explaining words instead of teaching science! Their method helped measure and reduce the "vocabulary burden" in textbooks.
Using Word Lists
Many researchers have made lists of words. These lists are based on words found in lots of English books and sometimes even spoken language. The lists are very reliable, even if they differ a little. Sometimes, one entry on a list can stand for several words. For example, the word "be" on a list might include "is," "was," "are," and "been." It's amazing that the 100 most common words make up half of all the words in a huge collection of English texts called the Oxford English Corpus!
A book called The Reading Teachers Book of Lists says that just the first 25 common words make up about one-third of all printed English. And the first 100 words make up about half of all written English!
One of the first readability tests, called the Dale–Chall formula, used a word list. It counted how many words in a text were *not* on its list of easy words. Then, it used a formula to give the text a "grade level," like 5th grade or 8th grade. This helped schools choose textbooks that were right for their students.
It's pretty easy for computers to use these word lists. The computer just checks each word in a text against the list. Then, it can tell you what percentage of words are on the list and use that to figure out the reading level.
Using Word Length
Another way to guess word difficulty is by looking at how long the words are. This is a good way because longer words are usually harder than shorter ones. It's not always true, but it's a good guess!
Word length can be measured by counting the letters in each word or by counting syllables (the parts of a word, like "syl-la-ble"). Some computer programs even count the number of vowels in words, since most syllables have one vowel sound.
How Hard Are the Sentences?
Sentence difficulty is usually measured by how long the sentences are. Again, this is a good guess because longer sentences are generally harder to understand than shorter ones. Computers can count the words between full stops. However, people can sometimes do a better job deciding if a semicolon or colon should count as the end of a "sentence" for testing.
Since both word difficulty and sentence difficulty can change independently, the best way to predict how hard a text is to read is to use a formula that looks at both things. This means the test gives you one score for a text. That score can then tell you the reading level, like an American school grade level (e.g., 7th grade), or a score from 0% to 100%. Both ways work well. The most important thing is:
- Tests that use both word difficulty and sentence difficulty are more accurate than tests that only use one.
Different Types of Readability Tests
You can do some readability tests yourself by counting words and doing some math. Or, you can use special software on a computer.
Tests Using People
- Multiple-choice questions: People read a text and then answer questions about it.
- Cloze test: People read a text where some words are missing (blanks). They have to fill in the blanks. The more blanks they fill in correctly, the easier the text is. This is a really good way to predict how hard a text is!
These tests that use people are very accurate. However, they need a group of readers and someone to run the test. They also need texts that are prepared just for the readers. Because of this, these tests are often too expensive for everyday use.
Tests on Texts (Using Formulas)
These tests use formulas to analyze the text itself, without needing people to read it.
Formulas Using Two Variables
These formulas look at both word difficulty and sentence difficulty.
- Dale–Chall formula
- Flesch Reading Ease
- Flesch–Kincaid Reading Level
- Fry readability formula
- Gunning Fog Index
- Spache
Formulas Using One Variable
These formulas usually look at just one thing, like word length or sentence length.
Readability on Wikipedia
In 2015, a report called Wikipedia Signposts looked at how easy it was to read health information online, including articles on English Wikipedia.
They found that many online health articles were "too difficult" for most people. For example, articles about "liposuction" (a type of surgery) and "breast reconstruction" (another surgery) were much harder to read than a 6th-grade level. The average score for popular "liposuction" websites was like a 13.6-grade level. For comparison, information about "tattoo" was at a 7.8-grade level.
The report also said that Wikipedia's articles on "breast reconstruction" had an average readability score of 13.4. And for "liposuction," Wikipedia's scores were even higher, above a 14th-grade level.
This shows that many medical articles on English Wikipedia are written in a way that is too hard for the average person to understand.
Related Pages
- Is Wikipedia too difficult? comparative analysis of Wikipedia, Simple Wikipedia and Britannica. [1]
- BYU Words and phrases: highlights text. [2] and [3]
