SMOG
The SMOG scale is yet another measure of readability, developed by G.H McLaughlin in 1969. MOG stands for measure of gobbledegook, while the S is variously described as standing for simple, standardized, short or statistical. This test can be done by hand, but it is a lengthy and cumbersome process.

SMOG+
There is, luckily for me and anyone else who quakes when asked to work with numbers, an easier way to do a SMOG calculation. Clear Language & Design (CLAD), a Toronto-based literacy organization, has a free Internet service to help you with it. Not only that, CLAD also asks you for further details about your readers and includes that information in its calculations. The site is at www.eastendliteracy.on.ca/ClearLanguageAndDesign.

Cloze test
One other test can be mentioned here—the Cloze test, in which readers are given a prepared text with some words omitted, often every fifth word. Readers are asked to fill in the blanks, and the number of correct answers is used to show how much of the text has been understood. This has the advantage of showing there has been a real understanding of the text—something that cannot be demonstrated by word-count and sentence-count methods. This testing is helpful when you work with people who can read fluently but may not understand the content.

Commonly, people understand words better if they hear them than if they read them. Aural skills are usually higher than reading skills.

Criticisms
Critics, myself included, often point out that sentence and word length alone cannot always adequately measure how readable a document is. Imagine writing health pamphlets for less skilled readers. A pamphlet about tonsillitis is likely to test at a higher level than one about cancer simply because tonsillitis has four syllables while cancer has only two. As a testing problem, this comes up regularly in materials designed for people with developmental disabilities (where the words developmental disabilities are five syllables each).

Nevertheless, using a measurement like Flesch-Kincaid will give you a rough idea of how difficult your materials are. And the grammar check tool is very useful for checking sentence length and the percentage of passive verbs used. These are both important points to work on when making text easier to read.

You may be asked to produce a document at a particular reading level, often for classroom use. The idea is useful, but not always practical. You may be writing about a topic whose name contains several syllables, or quoting a number of people who happen to have long names. Either situation will make it nearly impossible to reach the required level. If you are having this problem, try checking a copy of your text after temporarily deleting key words that appear the most often. You may find the difficulty rating drops by as much as two grade levels. In this case, there is clearly a limit to how far you can reduce the reading level.