The top part of SCORE READABILITY screen looks like this:

VIEW RESULTS: (will only appear if you scored a text and need to see it again) Click on the button and the screen will scroll to the current text scores.

IMPORT A FILE: Click the button to import a file. Text files (.txt) work best because no conversion is needed. Files like MS-WORD, OpenOffice, HTML, .rtf, etc. contain rich-text and are converted to retain formatting like bold-face, italics, font sizes, images, etc. Conversion takes more system resources and processing power.

Click Choose File to find the file on your device to load in.

SAVE TEXT AS: Click the button to save your text. You can save as .txt, .docx, .rtf, or .HTML. (It’s not possible to save your text as a .pdf). TIP: if you don’t need to retain text formatting, then save as .txt. If you need to retain formatting, save as .html since nearly all software programs and apps can import as .html without problems.

LOAD SAMPLE TEXT: Double-click the button to load a sample text. We provide 30+ sample texts to load in.

PASTE FROM CLIPBOARD: Pastes anything from the Clipboard into the text area.

COPY ALL TEXT: Copies all text in the text area to the Clipboard. It will retain all rich-text formatting.

CLEAR HIGHLIGHTS: Click once to remove any text highlights left by the app. This button is mainly used in the ROBERT GUNNING EDITOR.

CLEAR TEXT AREA: Double-click to clear all text and the cache.

SYSTEM SETTINGS: Click the button and a popup will appear with system settings.

Click-on or mouse over any [ ? ] for more information about the setting.

IMPORTANT: Any change in settings will return to default values if you refresh or close the app.

SCORE FULL TEXT or SAMPLES: (Toggle to change) The default is Score Full Text. For long texts over 10,000, you can choose to Score Samples. The app will score random passages from your text. Scoring random passages is not as precise as scoring a full text, but will still output an accurate score. Scoring samples instead of full text greatly speeds up the scoring process, especially for batch processing.

CONVERT TO PLAIN TEXT: Double-click to remove all rich-text and HTML formatting and convert to plain text.

UNDO/REDO CHANGE: The buttons look like this:

If you make changes to your text, you can undo or redo the last 10 changes. These buttons are mostly used in the Robert Gunning Editor as you edit your text.

RIGHT-PANEL STATS

When you first add text to the text area, you can click the text area to update and show stats on the right side of the text area. As you work on your text, these stats will keep updating.

EST. READABILITY SCORE updates as you work on your text. The score is a rough estimate. To get an accurate readability score, click on SCORE.

TEXT STATS updates as you work on your text. Click DETAILED to see full text stats.

NEUTRAL WORDS are words ignored in your text, such as email addresses, website URLs, and Emojis. These type of words add unnecessary complexity in a text. They are not counted as part of a readability score.

The READABILITY RESULTS screen looks like this:

Average Reading Level Calc (Consensus): ARLCalc scores your text and outputs a single score based on an average. The averaged score is more reliable and informative because it accounts for multiple aspects of reading difficulty. It will also tell you how many formulas are part of the average score. Click on READ MORE to learn more about your readers. You can learn more about how ARLCalc works at our website.

Most readability results will look like this:

SCORE: the score will either be a grade level or a reading scale.
READING DIFFICULTY: indicates how easy or hard the text is to read.
GRADE LEVEL: the grade level of the text or the education level needed to read the text.
AGE RANGE: the typical age of the reader.
CALCULATION ON YOUR TEXT: this shows how the formula calculated your text.

These buttons will appear in the left-side panel and at the bottom of the last result:

SCORE A DIFFERENT TEXT: click once to clear the text area and import a new text. Score the new text with the same formulas.
COPY FORMULA RESULTS: copies all results and calculations to the Clipboard.
RESCORE TEXT: click once to return to the top of the screen to select new formulas.