When composing for a global audience, you want your document to be understood by readers whose native language is not English. Rachel McAlpine wrote an excellent article with recommendations to make your documents readable and easy to translate. Unfortunately, the article is no longer available

Near the end of the article, Rachel McAlpine described the McAlpine EFLAW(TM) Readability Score. This numerical score is a function of the number of words in the document, the number of miniwords (3 or fewer characters), and the number of sentences. This VBScript program reads text from a specified text file and calculates the McAlpine EFLAW(TM) Readability Score.

You can copy any text from a web site or document and paste it into a text file using Notepad. Be sure to save the file using ANSI encoding (not Unicode). Don't include code, tables, or images.

The syntax to run the program at a command prompt would be:

cscript Eflaw.vbs <file name>

<file name> is the name of the text file to be analyzed. If the file is not in the current folder, include the full path. If you do not supply a file name, the program will prompt for the file.

The output from the program might look similar to below:

McAlpine EFLAW(TM) Readability Score - Copyright © 2006 Rachel McAlpine
Script by Richard L. Mueller, Copyright © 2012, Version 1.0
----------
File: ADLogonHours.txt
Number of words: 1322
Number of mini-words: 561
Number of sentences: 98
Words per sentence: 13.5
McAlpine EFLAW(TM) Readability Score: 19.2 (very easy to understand)

The Readability Scores have the following interpretations:

Eflaw.txt <<-- Click here to view or download the program