Flesch-Kincaid Reading Level

Hmm... can't seem to find much information about Fleisch-Kincaid online.
For the most recent part of my WIP it gives 75 and 5.6 as the values.
I doubt it means a lot, to be honest

If I'd googled it with the right spelling I might have found something, doh!

Reading Ease

Scores of 90.0–100.0 are considered easily understandable by an average 5th grader. 8th and 9th grade students could easily understand passages with a score of 60–70, and passages with results of 0–30 are best understood by college graduates. Reader's Digest magazine has a readability index of about 65, Time magazine scores about 52, and the Harvard Law Review has a general readability score in the low 30s. The highest (easiest) readability score possible is 121 (every sentence consisting of a one-syllable word); theoretically there is no lower bound on the score.

Grade Level

The "Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level Formula" translates the 0–100 score to a U.S. grade level.
The result is a number that corresponds with a grade level. For example, a score of 8.2 would indicate that the text is expected to be understandable by an average student in 8th grade.
The lowest grade level score in theory is -3.4, but, since there are no real passages that have every sentence consisting of a one-syllable word, this never occurs in practice. Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss comes close, averaging 5.7 words per sentence and 1.02 syllables per word, with a grade level of -1.3. (Most of the 812 words are monosyllabic: only one word ("anywhere"), which occurs eight times, is not.)

So how does everyone fare on this?

My YA is 5.3 and 75.

I'm trying to make it a bit harder to read, though. I don't want anyone falling asleep.

I once lost a co-writer over this wonderful little aspect of MS-Word.

She was one of my co-writers on a fanfic project, and had come in loving my previous work. She was a little kooky (but who isn't?) and everything was great.

At college one day, she was chatting to my friend (my MSN was screwy, but my friend's was just fine). I was watching the conversation, and she asked my friend if I was there. Intrigued, I told her to say no, and then my co-writer starts in on a rant about my FK level, and how it was so crap in comparison to her score.

In a nutshell: she said she couldn't respect my writing because of the score.

I think it's a guide more than anything else, and not something to base your enjoyment on.

There are a couple of threads on this in the Grammar for Grasshoppers forum, plus I think there are some old ones in Writing Novels. Here's one:

http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=40843&highlight=flesch

Just out of curiousity (as if I haven't already gone crazy enough), how does one go about deriving a Flesch-Kincaid score? Is it a feature in MS-WORD?

In MS Word: Tools->Options->Spelling & Grammar tab, check the box marked "readability statistics", then run a grammar check. At the end, it'll come up with the statistics.

Southern_girl29 said:

I just did a spell check on my edited young adult novel. At the end, I got the little box that gives the details of it. It said I had a one percent passive sentence structure, which is good. But, my Flesch reading ease is 93 and the reading level is 2.5. Does this mean anything? Do any of you pay attention to it?

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Yes. Sometimes books aimed at schools (and their libraries) use these statistics to determine suitability. In your case, it's telling you that the reading level is grade 2.5 and that 93% of the population (all ages) can understand your book.

It's based upon complexity of sentences, sentence length, and complexity of language. It's a good approximation of how difficult a book is to read. If you have a YA that reads at grade 12, you've got a big problem.

It's not infallible. You can make things that are impossible to understand that have low reading levels.

I write articles dealing with equine law. I aim for those articles to read at an grade 8 to 10 level. Forces me to make sure people can understand them. Newspapers are frequently written at grade 8 to 9.

Looking at your numbers, I'd see your book as being appropriate reading for grades 4 through 8. Reading it might make me move either up or down from there.

Just out of curiousity (as if I haven't already gone crazy enough), how does one go about deriving a Flesch-Kincaid score? Is it a feature in MS-WORD?

Click to expand...

It's a feature of MS-word. Go into your preferences menu, and choose spelling and grammar. There you should find something that says "show readability statistics." Tell it you want it to show them to you. The next time you do a spelling and grammar check, when it gets done, it will give you all the statistics on your document.

You've probably seen me use it on people's query letter in query letter hell. It's a simple, concrete way of saying the letter is too hard to read to make it seem like you write YA.

Jim Clark-Dawe

Okay, I just did mine the Microsoft Word way, and I'm down to 2.5. I think the internet calculators score higher? I don't know.

Good news: My passive sentences score is 0%. Nice.

In addition to this, I recall a measurement called the Fog Index:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunning-Fog_Index
Here's another page on it with a few "Don't use these humongous words and phrases, use these tiny ones instead" examples:
http://process.umn.edu/groups/ppd/documents/information/writing_tips.cfm

Rut roh. My latest query is at 52.9. Hopefully there's some smart agents out there.

In my current WIP as compared to a Hemingway short:

Grade level:
Hem: 4
Me 5.44

Passive voice percent%
Hem 3
Me 3

Sentence complexity: 100 being very difficult.
Hem 14
Me 36

Vocabulary complexity: 100 being very complex
Hem 5
Me 5

My book is a YA novel.

Here is my stats for my current WIP. It is yet unnamed.

Passive sentences: 4%
Flesch reading ease: 81.1
Flesch-Kincaid grade level: 4.2

The more dialogue, the lower your grade level...

maestrowork said:

The more dialogue, the lower your grade level...

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Makes sense, then. My novel is basically pillars of quotation marks.

TheIT said:

In MS Word: Tools->Options->Spelling & Grammar tab, check the box marked "readability statistics", then run a grammar check. At the end, it'll come up with the statistics.

Click to expand...

I can't find that feature. Is it only in newer versions of Word?

I have whatever this is that came with my 1999 machine, it says it's Word 2000, it has it.

My writing is usually below about 3.2 with 0-1% passive sentences and like 86 .whatever on the /100 number.

And I DID catch my eight-year-old sister reading my laptop when I ran upstairs for food. We were watching Dirty Jobs together. ( :| )

She's all, "What's this Nancy?"

I'm all, "I don't KNOW, Paige, what do you THINK it is?"

Contract type stuff is usually in the fifties or sixties, because then it's that much easier to sneak in hidden ish.

gem1122 said:

I can't find that feature. Is it only in newer versions of Word?

Click to expand...

After clicking on Spelling & Grammar, click on Options in the box that pops up. There should be a box to tick next to Readability Statistics.

Your word processor is likely to have a quick explanation of what those values mean. Mine has.

Scores

The thing to remember is that grade level score does not mean your fiction is written for that grade level. A grade level of 5 does not even mean a fifth grader can understand the content, only that a fifth grader can actually read the words. The typical newspaper is written at grade level six or seven, and the average pro writer writes at about the same level.

Hemingway typically wrote at grade level five, and most of Stephen King's work I've run through WordPerfect come out about grade level seven.

Writing at a grade level of ten does not mean you're writing well, it means it takes a tenth grader to read all the words. Not usually a good thing for fiction.

For most fiction, I would be a bit worried with a grade level below five, just as I would a grade level above nine.

I think it's a good thing to run books by writers you like through the Fleisch-Kincaid test on your word processor.

Fleisch-Kincaid can't tell you whether you write well or write poorly, but it is a good indicator that some problems exist.

Jamesaritchie said:

think it's a good thing to run books by writers you like through the Fleisch-Kincaid test on your word processor.

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As a shortcut, Amazon books with the "Search Inside This Book" feature have Fleisch-Kincaid stats on their text stats pages.

These are the text stats for my book on Amazon:

Readability (learn more)____ Compared with books in All Categories
Fog Index: 5.1____________ 3% are easier 97% are harder
Flesch Index: 80.9_______4% are easier 96% are harder
Flesch-Kincaid Index: 3.8___3% are easier 97% are harder

Complexity (learn more)
Complex Words: 5%________6% have fewer 94% have more

Syllables per Word: 1.4___9% have fewer 91% have more

Words per Sentence: 7.4



Easy to read it may be, but I certainly didn't write a children's book. Like I said before, if you have a lot of dialogue, it tends to pull your grade down a bit. If I check only the narrative part, the book is at about grade 7 or 8.