The limits of Rewordify.com

Every once in a while, we get an email from a user that asks things like:

• Why won't Rewordify.com reword my text to a certain grade level? (or)
• Why doesn't Rewordify.com reword this word or that word?

Rewordify.com knows over 40,000 difficult words and phrases, and we add new words and phrases to it almost every day. Also, we frequently make the site "smarter" at figuring out how hard words and phrases are used, so they're replaced with language that sounds natural and is easy to understand.

You also get our exclusive READ level (Rewordify.com Estimated Average Difficulty level), a highly valid measure of text complexity that works the same way as (and is strongly correlated to) the Lexile measure.

Sometimes these things work together beautifully, and sometimes they fall short. This is because working with language is terrifically difficult for computers, and no computer can come close to a human being's ability to figure out how hard a passage is, or how to re-state something more easily.

The limits of a computer

Computers think that this passage is easy to understand (READ 430, Lexile 480L):

Those who know the breath of forever know the crying of the Earth. They know the wall that is tomorrow. They know the sad waving of the tree branch. They know the pain of the dusty ebony sky.

Computers also think that this passage is many grade levels more difficult (READ 1390, Lexile 1050L):

The shocked policeman saw the alien whisk the surprised boy into the spaceship. The policeman sneaked down the hillside, through a maze of young maple trees, closer to the unlucky spot.

Rewordify.com can't simplify the first passage. It doesn't know why the Earth is crying.

The site can't simplify the second passage. It doesn't contain any difficult words, except maybe whisk, but eggs can be whisked as well as people, and we don't want to say that the boy was beaten.

Technical terms and troublesome words

Here's another example of a challenge for the site:

Washington applauded the conservative approach within Rickerson's organic Renaissance work.

A computer can't know that Washington means important scientists in Washington, D.C. Words like conservative and organic have multiple meanings that can be challenging to figure out. Also, Renaissance is a complex topic that can't be summarized in a few words.

The site can help!

The moral of this story? Although we make Rewordify.com better nearly every day, no computer can replace a teacher. But, Rewordify.com is a great learning tool that can empower independent learning when a teacher isn't around. Feel free to explore the site, learn how it can help, and contact us with any questions or suggestions.

New! Print cloze sheets for rewordified text

You can now print cloze (fill-in-the-blanks) sheets for rewordified text. This is a fun reading comprehension activity and it's also an effective formative assessment for reading comprehension.

Once you rewordify some text, you'll see a new button, "Print Cloze Activity," in the Learning Tools:

When you click it, you'll get a printout with a word bank, and the original text with underlines replacing the original hard words, like this:

Word Bank:

halcyon, imp, homestead

The ____________ view was beautiful to the ____________, 

who wondered when he would see his _________________ again. 




Check the "include key on printouts" for a teacher or a teaching assistant version.

NOTE: When you click the "learn" link on a web page, Rewordify.com extracts all the hard words from the web page into Rewordify.com to help students learn. Of course, the cloze activity doesn't work well in that case. It works best when you enter English sentences.

Try it out now! Copy-paste this text into the home page and see how it works:

The halcyon view was beautiful to the imp, who wondered when he would see his homestead again.

Good isn't good enough

We're adding smarter abilities to our Rewordifying Engine. It can now change how a word or phrase is reworded based on the part of speech of the surrounding words.

For example, the word noodled is reworded to played/thought if a preposition comes after it. Take a look at these three sentences:

The designer noodled up some color choices for her client.
The programmer noodled with different ways to make his site work better.
I am serving noodled potatoes for dinner.

To see how these sentences are reworded, click this icon:

We're constantly improving the site this way, including adding more words and phrases on an almost-daily basis.

Simplify your own website or blog with one click

By the way, did you like that one-click rewordifying feature? You can add it to your website or blog for free! Read about how one line of code can instantly simplify your website or blog and make it more accessible and readable for millions of people.

Learn better, from better rewordings

Rewordify.com now rewords difficult language in a more natural-sounding way.

The site identifies the part of speech of all difficult words based on how they're used in sentences, and rewords them accordingly.

Example 1:
For example, this sentence uses the word brooding as a verb:

There's no sense in brooding about poor grades in English class.

That sentence will be reworded to:

There's no sense in sadly thinking about poor grades in English class.

Example 2:
This sentence uses the word brooding as an adjective:

Now there's a way to help a class full of brooding English students.

That sentence will be reworded to:

Now there's a way to help a class full of quiet and sad English students.

This rewordifying improvement happens because we've created an accurate part of speech tagger that tries to do its best to figure out how each word you enter is used in a sentence. Keep in mind that no part of speech tagger is perfect, and there will be instances where the site doesn't get it right. We are constantly reviewing the site to improve it, of course.

If you see a mistake, please let us know, and enjoy using the more-accurate Rewordify.com!

Rewordify.com will soon be even better

We're working hard to make our translation (what we call our "rewordifying") much better.

Rewordify.com is being enhanced to understand the parts of speech of the sentences you enter and to display a different definition depending on the part of speech of the original word. This will give you even more accurate, understandable output.

For example, right now, any time you enter the word "corral," Rewordify.com changes it to "collect/meeting place."

So, the sentence:

I'll meet you at the corral. ("corral" is a noun)

is reworded to:

I'll meet you at the collect/meeting place.

and the sentence:

Be sure to corral the animals by sunset.  ("corral" is a verb)

is resulted to:

Be sure to collect/meeting place the animals by sunset.

But soon, the site will be smarter. It will know whether words (like "corral") are used as nouns, verbs, or adjectives. So, the two sentences from above will soon be reworded to:

I'll meet you at the meeting place.

and

Be sure to collect the animals by sunset.

The site correctly served up a noun for a noun, and a verb for a verb.

Stay tuned for the announcement on the home page sometime in January for this great enhancement to Rewordify.com.

Our upgrade is finished!

We just completed the biggest-ever upgrade to Rewordify.com. A big thanks to all the users who wrote in and suggested features; most of them have been incorporated into the site!

Some of these features are so important to you, that we made them live before all the documentation is complete. There's a video on the home page, new information on the Help page (formerly the Details page), and on the Settings page.

We are working hard to update the documentation for the new features; look for an expanded and easier-to-navigate Help page, as well as new information on the Teacher page and in this blog in the next week.

Here's a list of the new and changed features:

• The site now speaks hard words out loud. This great new feature is available after you rewordify a block of text, and it works on the Flash Cards and Online Quiz. Read more.
  
• You can now choose from six different rewordifying levels, to match the output text difficulty and vocabulary list difficulty with a broad range of readers.
  
  The "Maximum" choice (one of the six difficulty levels) uses very short definitions that significantly simplify text, but may remove some meaning from the text.
  
  The remaining choices (Level 1 through Level 5) use more descriptive definitions that help explain in more detail what many words mean. As the level goes up, the words that are targeted for rewordifying get harder and harder, to allow the site to adapt to different reading levels.
• You can now print the rewordified text; there's a "Print text" link at the top right of all rewordified text.
• We now show a READ level (the Rewordify.com Estimated Average Difficulty level), our highly valid measure of text difficulty. It uses Brigham Young University's Corpus of Contemporary American English to determine the average log frequency of all the words in the blocks of text you rewordify. The READ level is strongly correlated to the Lexile measure. Read more about the READ level.
• We partner with the leading web filtering company to aggressively block school-inappropriate sites from being rewordified, and we also use our own proprietary filters to keep students safe while rewordifying web pages. Over 2,300,000 web sites are now blocked from being rewordified, and more are added every day.
• We added over 3,000 words and improved thousands of definitions in the Rewordifying Engine, and we continue to work hard at improving the site's translation quality.
• We made lots of other design and programming changes to make the site work faster and better.

Please watch the video on the home page and contact us with any questions or concerns. We're going to update a number of blog entries in the near future to reflect the site features.

Happy rewordifying!

New books on the "Read" page

We added some great books to our "Read" page:

• 1984 (Orwell)
• The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
• Animal Farm (Orwell)
• Of Human Bondage (Maugham)
• Nostromo (Conrad)
• Portnoy's Complaint (Roth)
• Lord of the Flies (Golding)
• Brave New World (Huxley)
• To The Lighthouse (Woolf)
• An American Tragedy (Dreiser)
• The Good Soldier (Ford)
• Tender is the Night (Fitzgerald)
• Winesburg, Ohio (Anderson)

Understand more of the classics starting now!

The "Read" page is a collection of great literature, but you don't have to stop there. You can rewordify almost any web page out there, or any text you copy-paste in. Happy reading and understanding!