thom@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu (Thom Gillespie) (04/08/89)
Does anyone know of any utilities which are set up for measuring readability, grade levels, levels of difficulty, etc. I have a bunch of stacks with tons of text in fields. I'm planning to write some scripts to look at number of words, word lengths, etc but if someone has something already they wouldn't mind sharing , that would be fine also. If I don't get anything, I'll just post my stacks for others to use. Thanks Thom Gillespie
tecot@Apple.COM (Ed Tecot) (04/10/89)
I don't know if it helps, but FullWrite Professional does this. _emt
jmunkki@kampi.hut.fi (Juri Munkki) (04/12/89)
In article <28686@apple.Apple.COM> tecot@Apple.COM (Ed Tecot) writes: >I don't know if it helps, but FullWrite Professional does this. It's very easy to fool FullWrites's "Lix" index. I don't think that the index has any real significance. Nisus also has a readability index. I haven't tested it, but at least the manual tells that "The Flesch Reading Ease is on a scale of 1 to 100, 100 being the easiest to read." The FullWrite manual doesn't tell whether 13 is good or bad... I wonder why they missed those enabled gray lines in the nisus menus. The first one is in the apple menu and the second is in the tools menu... That kind of bugs are usually long gone, when an application goes into beta testing. _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._ | Juri Munkki jmunkki@hut.fi jmunkki@fingate.bitnet I Want Ne | | Helsinki University of Technology Computing Centre My Own XT | ^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^
tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney) (04/12/89)
In article <28686@apple.Apple.COM> tecot@Apple.COM (Ed Tecot) writes: >I don't know if it helps, but FullWrite Professional does this. In article <21121@santra.UUCP> jmunkki@kampi.UUCP (Juri Munkki) writes: >It's very easy to fool FullWrites's "Lix" index. I don't think that the >index has any real significance. Very true. I recently wrote an SF short story that was crammed full of obscure technical terms from neuropsychology. FWP told me it was on a seventh grade reading level. It seems to ignore words that aren't in its dictionary, instead of using the reasonable heuristic that any word it doesn't know is probably obscure and should boost the level. -- Tim Maroney, Consultant, Eclectic Software, sun!hoptoad!tim "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine." -- Patti Smith
thom@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu (Thom Gillespie) (04/13/89)
Every body suggested FullWrite but I moved copies of my text from all the stacks into text files , sent them up to unix and used wwb (writers workbench) on them and it worked well. I think the button script was about 6 lines to empty all the card fields into a file. I did have to to open up the text files in macwrite and then save them with linefeeds before I sent them to unix. Thanks to all who sent suggestions. -thom Gillespie .