I used three Cloze procedures to calculate the readability of an article by Olivia Gude titled Postmodern

Principles: in Search of 21st Century Art Education. I used Frys readability graph, the Word readability
calculator, and the Gunning-Fox readability formula. All three calculations scored my selected text at
very high levels of reading ability.
Frys readability graph sets my text at a college reading level. My three passages contained,
respectively, 4 sentences and 171 syllables, 3 sentences and 197 syllables, and 3 sentences and 171
syllables. The low sentence count put my passages into the long sentences category, which is
considered harder to understand. This text is full of references to artists and pieces of works. It also
contains lists of items, processes, and examples. I do not find the sentences hard to comprehend at this
length as some of these things are easily understood as a single item or group even though they are
made up of many words and therefore cause the sentence to be long.
The Microsoft Word readability calculator uses Flesch-Kincaid algorithms to calculate the readability of
the text. This also places great importance on the length of sentences. The passages scored at grade
levels 16.9, 22.6, and 24.6. This is much higher than necessary in my opinion. I feel the discrepancy lies
in the idea that a long sentence is hard to understand. This article contains art concepts that are meant
to be learned at a high school level. The wordiness of the sentences is misleading as to the general ease
or difficulty of understanding the idea portrayed in that sentence.
The Gunning-Fox readability formula calculated my passages at grade levels 25.19, 33.63, and 33.49.
This calculation again puts a great deal of importance on the length of sentences. Having only 3 or 4
sentences per 100 words sets the grade level very high immediately. The other part of the calculation
carries much less weight. It is the number of big words (3 or more syllables) in the passages. This text
contained a lot of 3 syllable or more words that are not unreasonable to expect a high school student to
comprehend.
In conclusion, I think that calculating how easy or difficult a text is to read based solely on numbers is
inaccurate. It may be a helpful tool to gage a text at first glance, but ultimately a teacher should
perform a lot more analysis to decide whether or not the text is appropriate for a particular group of
students. A text should not be entirely discarded because it scores high or low based on these and
similar readability calculations.