Writing For Children? Try This Cool Free Website!
Whether you are writing for the educational market or the mass market, if your target audience is children, you want to be sure they will understand what you are writing. How do you double-check the reading level of what you've written?
As adults, we often forget that children have a limited vocabulary and the vocabulary they can read lags behind their spoken language by up to two years.
Some things that can help children understand your writing include trying to limit your vocabulary to the first part of the Dolch word list, using short simple sentences, and writing in the present tense, Many children's authors will also leave out quotation marks or opt to create their book as a comic book aka graphic novel.
As a teacher trying to choose grade-level appropriate books for my students, I have looked around on the internet to see if there might be some way to quickly assess the reading level of the books. When I found Readability Scoring System (readabilityformulas.com) I fell in love!
 |
| Screenshot of the ReadabilityFormulas Website |
The REadability Formulas Website has a really cool tool that makes assessing the grade level of a piece of writing so easy!
You simply copy and paste or upload the text you want to assess, choose your assessment tools, click the button to start the process and boom!
The site has a wide variety of assessment tools and the differences in the results can be quite eye-opening. For example, many times I will input a piece of writing and get a huge range of grade-level results! However, the explanation given for each result helps me understand why that grade level is given for that particular piece of writing.
If you are writing for children or even English language learners, you may find the Readability Formulas website is a great free tool to use.
About This Author
Sister Su is grateful to God for keeping her alive. She is a Trent/Queen's Concurrent Education graduate with over 20 years of teaching experience. She writes on several blogs, has a YouTube channel and is most easily reached through Twitter @Sister_Su See her link tree for more details:@Sister_Su | Linktree
This post was proofread with the free version of Grammarly
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thamks so much for commenting! Family-friendly comments will be posted after moderation.