Reading Level Analysis

NOTE: THIS ARTICLE IS OBSOLETE. Our new READ level is live. We will be updating the blog with more information by January 1, 2014. More information about the READ level is on our Help page (formerly the Details page).


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.