Evaluate Text Complexity

Handy website Lexile Analyzer analyzes and evaluates the readability of text whether books, articles, or other materials.

The software does this by breaking down the text and studying its characteristics, such as sentence length and word frequency, "which represent the syntactic and semantic challenges that the text presents to a reader."

The result is the text complexity, expressed as a Lexile ® measure, along with information on the word count, mean sentence length, etc.

This software is free, but you do have to register. For information, read the documentation on the Lexile website.

Takeaway Truth

This is an excellent tool to help you analyze your own writing to make sure it's suitable for your target audience.