When my friend, Kris, who teaches English and Writing at a community college, critiqued the first few chapters of my manuscript, one of the first things she did was analyze them using the Fry Graph readability formula. Unfortunately this formula doesn’t tell an author how much his readers will enjoy his writing, but it does calculate how easy or difficult his writing is to read. The Fry Graph result is a grade level. If the analysis result is 6.4, that means that most sixth graders would be able to read it. It counts the number of syllables and sentences in a hundred-word writing sample, and plots words vs. syllables on a graph. The more syllables and the fewer sentences there are, the higher the grade level. It’s best to use descriptive or narrative parts of a piece of fiction, not dialogue. The analysis is simple. This is how to do it. So that’s great, you say, but what good is it? Edward Fry developed the… Read More »