Text Assessment

There are essentially two ways to assess the readability of a text. "Global" approaches seek to evaluate a text as a whole. ("Readability formulas" are perhaps the most common variety of global assessment.) "Local" approaches, however, look inside the text at the specific vocabulary or syntactic structures that make reading a challenge.

At TText, we prefer to look at the "texture" of a text, because this information is most useful for writers, educators, and researchers who want to understand how and why a particular text is readable, or not. We see the "TopoText" software development project as one way to help writers improve the readability of their texts without resorting to readability formulas.