Trade your summaries from exercise 1 with a classmate. Proofread your classmate’s summary and make changes to improve the clarity. Has the ‘readability’ changed?
Exercise 1
Summarise in 100 words the tutorial on: http://www.apastyle.org/learn/tutorials/basics-tutorial.aspx. Calculate the ‘readability’ score for your summary. Make sure your readability score is above 70 (if using the Flesch Reading Ease equation, or less than 6 if using the Flesch–Kincaid Grade level score). Many word processing packages calculate ‘readability’ for you (e.g. for Word, search ‘readability’ on the Microsoft page). If not, here is how they are calculated (this is from the Microsoft webpage). Flesch Reading Ease (100-point scale with high scores being more readable) is: 206.835 – (1.015 × ASL) – (84.6 × ASW) where ASL = average sentence length (the number of words divided by the number of sentences) and ASW = average number of syllables per word (the number of syllables divided by the number of words). An alternative statistic is the Flesch–Kincaid Grade level. A score of 6 means that a sixth grader should be able to understand the text. In the US a sixth grader is about 11–12 years old. The statistic is: (0.39 × ASL) + (11.8 × ASW) – 15.59 where ASL and ASW are the same as above