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Average-grade-level. The tool for topic extraction, text analysis and abstract generation. SMOG Readability Calculator by G Harry McLaughlin. By G. Harry McLaughlin My readability formula SMOG estimates the years of education needed to understand a piece of writing. SMOG is widely used, particularly for checking health messages. A 2010 study in the Journal of The Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh calls SMOG the gold standard and concludes that it should be the preferred measure of webpage readability. But ATOS for Text has been much better validated than any other readability formula. It uses a dictionary giving the difficulty of each word (determined from 650 normed reading texts, a corpus of 474 million words, and the reading records of 30,000 students tested on 950,000 books). If you still want to use SMOG use click here for a free online tool which calculates it and three other readability measures. The precise formula for SMOG yields an outstandingly high 0.985 correlation with the grades of readers who had 100% comprehension of test materials.

You may have seen SMOG conversion tables compiled by one Harold C. Readability.info for web pages and word documents. Readability Tests » Joe's Web Tools. Edit Central - readability test. Contents Introduction: On Writing Style and Diction Tools Sponsored Links Reference Books Technical Notes Privacy Policy Contact Introduction: On Writing If you want to become a better writer, you need to do the following, in order of priority: (1) write a lot, and (2) seek ideas and inspiration, and (3) get the technical details right. This web site is mostly about the third and least important of these points. It should not be a surprise that to improve your writing you should write a lot. If you want to improve your piano playing, do you really think that you should spend a lot of time looking at piano catalogs? Or reading stories about famous piano players? Or worrying about what terms should be in your first recording contract?

Inspiration does have a role to play, particularly if it can get you to write more. Lastly, there are the rules of grammar, punctuation, and spelling. Style & Diction This is an interactive section for checking a sample of writing. Sponsored Links Privacy Policy. 8 Readability Web Tools to Test Your Writing Quality. Readability is the quality of writing that makes it easy (or difficult) to read and understand. Ever since the web started stringing together HTML pages, readability acquired a different sort of importance.

You can click on a URL and reach a webpage that’s designed for a 10 year old. You can click on another link which takes you straight to Stephen Hawking’s last paper. Information is useful only if we can make sense out of it. This is where readability web tools for web pages comes in. As Wikipedia says, readability of a particular text is measured using certain formulas. A tool that’s close by for readability analysis is in MS Word itself. The Wikipedia article on readability has another little tidbit of information – nearly all of today’s blockbuster writers write at the 7th-grade level, including John Grisham, Stephen King, J. Where does your writing measure up against this piece of fact? The Readability Test Tool Juicy Studio’s Readability Test Online-utility.org Readability.info.

Typofile Magazine - The best faces for the Screen. First, he suggests considering sans serif faces for body text. "When printed, the serifs on typefaces are only a tiny percentage of the typeface's design. But on-screen, in order to display the serifs using the limited number of available pixels, they take up a much bigger proportion of the information than they do on a printed page. Serifs should be small things--but on screen they become big--no longer visual cues but noise--distracting chunks of interference. " While some traditional serif faces don't translate well to the screen, others are excellent on-screen, and a serif's more familiar shape makes it more comfortable and familiar for most people. This site uses Memphis/Rockwell or Bitstream Geoslab703, a simple slab serif that's very comfortable on both PC and Mac.

(You can download this font for free). Bigelow also stresses that the hinting of individual fonts can be as important as the typeface design itself. Writing for the Web (Jakob Nielsen)