Reading levels explained Created by pfranklyn on 9/17/2010 7:10:48 AM
Throughout the translation workflow, reading levels were measured for the Common English Bible. Our target range is a 7th-8th grade level, and that is what the translation teams achieved. This measure is evidence of the smooth, natural, and clear reading experience that the CEB tries to offer.
Graded reading measurements are not a measure of the reader's intelligence. We have IQ tests to rank individual intelligence. Reading scores are a measure of two primary variables: sentence length and number of words with multiple syllables. By the time students reach graduate school, they are trained to unravel the meaning of complex and often obscure sentences, which contain numerous dependant clauses and technical jargon, with many multi-syllabic words or compound words that conjoin meanings. Now read the previous sentence again and thus experience the discomfort that a typical reader gets when trying to understand a Bible translation with complex sentences. Eighty-five percent of all readers--including our own precocious children in third grade--are comfortable at a 7th to 8th grade level. College graduates (who continue to read) are comfortable at a 10th grade level. Again, this is not a measure of intelligence or someone else's dumbness. To think this way is to think more arrogantly about one's intelligence than one should. Reading measurements are a measure of the writer's clarity.
More than 200 mathematical formulas exist for measuring the reading grade level of a document. These tools were developed over the past 75 years by journalists who were able to prove statistically that document circulation goes down as reading measurements go up. One of the formulas is built into Microsoft Word for checking your writing clarity, but it tends to overestimate the grade by two levels. The Common English Bible is measured with the most reliable formula, known as Dale-Chall. It measures sentence length and complex words, plus it scores the document against vocabulary word lists derived from school assessments. Proper nouns (names of people and places) are excluded to get an accurate score. We measured the first and final drafts of each book of the Bible as the translation developed.
It is possible to produce a clear and accurate Bible translation that most children and adults will choose to read.
~~ Paul Franklyn
Associate Publisher
