Using Fry’s Readability

CALCULATING READABILITY

Presented by: Stephanie Barry, M.S., CCC-SLP

Independent Speech

www.independentspeech.com

Why calculate Readability

A person would calculate readability if they are interested in knowing the reading level of a particular book or reading selection.

Determining Readability using Fry’s Readability will provide you with the grade level or age level of the selected material.

This can help you decide if a book is too easy or too hard for the intended reader.

How to Calculate Readability

Select three 100 word sections from the reading selection. Try to select one from the beginning, one from the middle and one from the end. This helps get a better sampling of the book as a whole.

Count the number of syllables in the section.

Count the number of sentences in the section.

Plot the points on either the age level graph or the grade level graph.

Special Considerations

You do count proper nouns

You do not count numbers

Words with a hyphen are counted as one word

Count abbreviations as the whole word

Count lists as one sentence if the items are separated by a comma or semicolon. For example, “I went to the store and bought eggs, milk, butter and bread.” is one sentence.

Lists like this page would contain 6 sentences.

An Example

I choose one section of text that had 10o words. This section contained 115 syllables and 4 sentences. If I plot this on the graph it would look like this:

You can see my selection is at the 7th grade level though not too far above the 6th

grade.

Here is the Fry’s Readability Chart to Determine Grade Level

Here is the Fry’s Readability Chart to Determine Age Level

Other Methods

There are many other methods out there to calculate readability. Some are do it yourself like this one and some are computer based programs.

I like this one because it is fairly easy and gives me accurate results.

Try it out and if it is not fit your needs there are many others to choose from!

Notes

The charts were taken from:

http://www.idph.state.ia.us/health_literacy/common/pdf/tools/fry.pdf