Reading Level Analysis

When you rewordify a web page or a block of text, Rewordify.com displays a Readability Bar and a number:

The Readability Bar shows about what percentage of people in the American English-speaking population who can (shown in green) and cannot (shown in red) completely understand the passage.

The expression completely understand means that the reader will clearly understand 99.5% of the words in the passage.

The number after the chart is the Reading Level. This chart shows what the Reading Levels mean:

Level	Quick Description	Percentage of difficult words	Clearly understood by percentage of the population:
1	broadly accessible	<0.5%	Almost 100%
2	generally accessible	0.5%-1%	Between 80%-90%
3	mostly understandable	1%-2%	Between 70%-79%
4	somewhat understandable	2%-3%	Between 60%-69%
5	partially understandable	3%-4%	Between 50%-59%
6	somewhat challenging	4%-5%	Between 40%-49%
7	challenging	5%-6%	Between 30%-39%
8	more challenging	6%-7%	Between 20%-29%
9	difficult	7%-8%	Between 10%-19%
10	very difficult	>8%	Less than 10%

Sample Reading Level Analysis

The Reading Level Analysis is accurate at determining how understandable a text passage is to the broad English speaking population. It determines difficulty by determining the rate within a passage of difficult words. This is more accurate than simply determining sentence lengths, syllable counts, or word frequencies.

Here are two short passages. They have similar sentence structures, sentence lengths, and word lengths, but there's a big difference in difficulty between them:

Passage 1:
My mother screamed and yelled over the noise of the gigantic trucks on the expressway. She finally convinced me to stop worrying about my cousins and brothers and their ridiculous problems. I relaxed and listened to her.

Passage 2:
She primped her lush coiffure, ignoring him, yearning vainly for her vanished days of halcyon freedom. Her estranged paramour lurked yet in the chamber, his icy glare assailing her. She brushed, brushed, silently, warily, brashly, venomously.

Obviously, Passage 2 is much, much more difficult than Passage 1. But you wouldn't know it by most measures, except for our Reading Level Analysis:

	Passage 1 (easy)	Passage 2 (hard)
Words	37	36
Characters	184	207
Sentences	3	3
Words per sentence	12.3	12.0
Characters per word	4.8	5.4
Flesch Reading Ease (higher is easier)	66.2	56.0
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (higher is harder)	7.0	8.4
Lexile® measure	770L	1040L
Rewordify.com reading level (higher is harder)	1	10

As you can see, our Reading Level Analysis is the only measure that gives a true representation of the huge difference in difficulty between the passages.

Here are some samples of reading passages at all of our Reading Levels.

We welcome you to try it out! Use our Analyzer as much as you want, for free, and be sure to post your opinions and comments here, or send in your comments on our web site.

We encourage learning

There are millions of biographical, legal, medical, historical, artistic, and scientific words in English that you should learn, and that you can learn.

We're not going to starve your mind of knowledge by oversimplifying everything and taking all the important things out of what you read. We want you to read more and learn new things.

We're not going to hide the words Vietnam War and replace them with the word war.

We're not going to hide the words Harriet Beecher Stowe and replace them with the word writer.

We're not going to hide the words cerebral palsy and replace them with the word disease.

Why?

Because you should know what those things are (and a lot of other things, too).

If you see a word that you don't know, look it up online and learn it, using Rewordify.com if necessary to help you understand what you read.

Words can mean different things

Language is really, really complicated, and it's extremely difficult to simplify it sometimes because most words can mean very different things depending on how they're used.

Words like despite, confirm, and bearing can't be easily simplified because it's difficult for a computer to figure out what these words mean in a sentence.

Here's an example. The word bearing can mean "direction":

In hopes of finding the lost hikers, we proceeded on the same bearing.

Or, it can mean "tolerating":

She sometimes thought she'd never survive the pain she was bearing.

Because of this sort of thing, we sometimes choose to leave a word alone because of the risk of creating sentences that make no sense, like these:

The plane was tolerating, without further incident, northeasterly through the blue sky. 

Miraculously, the roof beams were direction the heavy weight of the wet snow on the roof.

Sometimes, we can rewordify common expressions that use these multiple-meaning words. For example, the expression bearing up under always means "tolerating". But sometimes we don't get lucky, and we leave the word alone for readers to learn.

Before suggesting a change

We need your help to make Rewordify.com better at making English easier to read.

Before sending us a suggestion, please know:

• Some web pages won't look right, or won't be readable, when you try to rewordify them. It can be impossible for us to display certain web pages correctly because of the way those pages are written. Give us the URL that doesn't display right, and we'll try to fix it, though. If you can't read a rewordified web page, just copy the original page's text and rewordify it from the bottom box on our home page.
  
• If you have a suggestion for improving how we rewordify something, please give us details. Don't just say something like, "You're messing up the word "specious." Tell us the word or phrase you think we could improve, and give us the URL (or sentence) where our mistake exists. Tell us why we're wrong and how we can do better.
  
• If it looks like we rewordified something wrong, first check the original writing to make sure that the original author didn't misuse a word. For example, did he or she write "this is an eminent threat" instead of "this is an imminent threat"?
  
• We might not use your suggestion because words can mean different things, and your suggestion might result in our producing sentences that don't make sense.
   
• We might not rewordify a word, name, or phrase if it's an important person or term, because we encourage learning. We won't oversimplify language so much that you don't learn anything new.

 Thanks a lot for helping us improve!