Readability Studio Features / Readability Software / Readability Formulas

Numerous insightful tests

Readability Studio offers many popular readability tests for English text, including all the following:

In addition, Readability Studio offers in-depth explanations for these tests. Each test result includes an interpretation of the score and the factors that affect it.

The program also provides many useful features to help review the difficult aspects of your document. This includes lists of various difficult words and views of the document with difficult words and sentences highlighted. These tools can assist you in improving your documents so that they meet their target audiences.

Another important feature is that the program analyzes the entire content of your document (rather than subsamples). This will give you the most accurate results possible.

Finally, the Professional edition of Readability Studio offers multiple-document analysis. The program can analyze hundreds (or even thousands) of documents at once and aggregate their results. This includes all readability scores, difficult word and sentence statistics, and grammar issues. You can also “drill down” into a specific document to review it in deeper detail.

Helpful assistance for test selection

Readability Studio presents an intuitive interface for selecting readability tests. Experts can manually select the tests that they want to perform, while those less familiar with these tests can be guided through a helpful wizard. This wizard can recommend which tests to include based on the document's type (e.g., text book) or industry (e.g., health care).

Graphics

Readability Studio includes numerous graphs to help visualize your results. Both graphical tests, Fry and Raygor, are included, as well as a bar chart showing a breakdown of the difficult word categories. If you are reviewing Dolch Sight Words, then breakdown charts of your category usage and coverage are also included.

Multiple-document graphs are also provided in the Professional edition of Readability Studio. Here, histograms and box plots show the distribution of a document collection's test scores. This is useful for summarizing the general reading level of a batch of documents. It is also useful for finding problematic documents in a batch (i.e., outliers).

Detailed statistics

Numerous sentence and word statistics are provided. This includes a full difficult-words breakdown and word & sentence-length averages. The detail level of these statistics can also be toggled from minimal to verbose.

Lists of difficult words and sentences

Lists of difficult words and sentences are broken down by category and can easily be searched, sorted, printed, and exported. A separate list for each type of difficult word (e.g., 3+ syllables) is included, as well as a list of overly-long sentences. These lists provide detailed information about each difficult word, such as its syllable count and frequency. This enables you to search for either the most difficult words or the difficult words that occur most frequently.

These lists are also interactive. You can double-click on a word (or sentence) in a list, and the program will switch to the document display with the first occurrence of that word selected. This is useful for quickly finding a difficult word or sentence in its original context.

Document highlighting

Difficult words and sentences are also shown highlighted in their original context. This is useful in finding “trouble spots” in your document.

Grammar tools

Along with readability analysis, Readability Studio also offers basic grammar checking. The program can detect the following problems:

Repeated words
Redundant phrases
Wordy phrases
Clichés
Overly-long sentences
Lowercased sentences
Sentences that begin with conjunctions

These issues are shown highlighted in your document for easy review. They are also aggregated into sortable lists to give a general overview of any problems and to assist in finding specific issues.

Dolch Sight Words

Readability Studio also includes a Dolch suite of statistics and graphs, which is useful for educators and writers who work with young readers. The program provides a complete breakdown of Dolch words that you are using (and not using) in your materials. This enables writers to see how they can improve their Dolch practice materials. This also enables educators to determine which materials are appropriate for Dolch practice.

Numerous file formats supported

Readability Studio supports importing text from many file formats, including:

ANSI and Unicode text (*.txt)
Microsoft® Word 95-2003 documents (*.doc)
Microsoft® Word 2007 documents (*.docx)
OpenOffice documents (*.odt)
HTML (*.htm)
Rich text (*.rtf)
Postscript (*.ps)
Email files (*.eml)

You do not need the native application for these file formats. Readability Studio is capable of importing these files without any additional programs*.

Advanced exporting capabilities

Readability Studio provides printing and exporting capabilities for all test scores, word lists, statistics, graphs, etc. This enables you to easily share and publish your results.

Test results, statistics, and difficult word lists can all be exported as HTML or text.
Highlighted document views can be exported as RTF, HTML, or text.
Graphs can be exported as TIFF, JPG, BMP, PNG, or PCX.

Flexibility

Finally, Readability Studio is highly configurable. Many options, such as how documents are analyzed and how the results are displayed, are customizable. For example, you can specify how numeric words (e.g., “10/26/1974”) are syllabized. Other programs either sound out each digit or treat the entire word as one syllable and you cannot change this. With Readability Studio, you can toggle this behavior at anytime.

* Native applications for files such as Microsoft® Word documents are required to edit them.

Readability Studio's Unique Features