What Is Dale-Chall Readability?
As a writer of any form or niche, you should be concerned with how readable your texts are. Edgar Dale and Jeanne Chall came up with a method for evaluating your content's readability.
The Dale-Chall readability formula is an assessment that provides a numerical scale indicating the readability of content, similar to the Flesch-Kincaid approach.
It uses a list of simple monosyllabic words that a fourth-grader would comfortably read. As the scores increase, the readability decreases.
Here is the formula for calculating the readability score using the Dale–Chall method (1948), which takes into account the number of words, difficult words, and sentences:
0.1579 × (100 × difficult words ÷ words) + 0.0496 × (words ÷ sentences)
Dale–Chall readability scores
| Score | Grade |
|---|---|
| 4.9 or lower | 4th grade or lower |
| 5 - 5.9 | 5th or 6th grade |
| 6 - 6.9 | 7th or 8th grade |
| 7 - 7.9 | 9th or 10th grade |
| 8 - 8.9 | 11th or 12th grade |
| 9 - 9.9 | 13th to college |
How Can You Increase Dale-Chall Readability Score?
You can increase the score by including more of the words in the updated Dale-Chall familiar words. These words, which are simple and monosyllabic, make the passage even easier to read.
What Is the Dale-Chall Readability Calculator?
This online tool can be used to calculate the readability of a text using the Dale Chall readability formula. All you have to do is to paste your whole content or the passage you want to evaluate into the input above.