I already mentioned Amazon’s text stats in a post where I tried to explain why they were far from being useful in every situation: A note on Amazon’s text readability stats, published last December.

I found an example which shows particularly well why you cannot rely on these statistics when it comes to get a precise picture of a text’s readability. Here are the screenshots of text statistics describing two different books (click on them to display a larger view):

The two books look quite similar, except for the length of the second one, which seems to …

I would like to write a word about the beginnings of computer-aided readability assessment research in Canada during the ‘90s, as they show interesting ways of thinking and measuring the complexity of texts.

Sato-Calibrage

Daoust, Laroche and Ouellet (1997) start from research on readability as it prevailed in the United States : they aim at finding a way to be able to assign a level to texts by linking them to a school level. They assume that the discourses of the school institutions are coherent and that they can be examined as a whole. Among other things, their criteria concern lexical …

Recently, Jean-Philippe Magué advised me of the newly introduced text stats on Amazon. A good summary by Gabe Habash on the news blog of Publishers Weekly describes the perspectives and the potential interest of this new software : Book Lies: Readability is Impossible to Measure. The stats seem to have been available since last summer. I decided to contribute to the discussion on Amazon’s text readability statistics : to what extent are they reliable and useful ?

Discussion

Gabe Habash compares several well-known books and concludes that the sentence length is determining in the readability measures used by Amazon. In fact, the …

Jean-Philippe Magué told me there was a Google advanced search filter that checked the result pages to give a readability estimate. In fact, it was introduced about seven months ago and works to my knowledge only for the English language (that’s also why I didn’t notice it).

Description

For more information, you can read the official help page. I also found two convincing blog posts showing how it works, one by the Unofficial Google System Blog and the other by Daniel M. Russell.

The most interesting bits of information I was able to find consist in a brief …

Lord Kelvin

Here is what William Thompson, better known as Lord Kelvin, once said about measure:

« I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of Science, whatever the matter may be. »
William Thompson, Lecture on “Electrical Units of Measurement” (3 May 1883)

Bachelard

I found …