Software to Determine the Readability of Written Documents by Implementing a Variation of the Gunning Fog Index Using the Google Linguistic Corpus

Abstract

In English linguistics the Gunning Fog Index is used to determine the readability of texts. This methodology isn’t as effective in the Spanish language because the complexity of words isn’t determined by the number of syllables, unlike what happens in English. Therefore, a software was developed that allows us to estimate the readability of an academic text written in Spanish in a quantitative way. This software allows to compare the traditional methodology of the Gunning fog index and a modification to it, using the corpus linguistics for the Spanish language, based on thousands of texts digitized by Google, where the frequency of use of certain words is related. Texts produced by students from first to last semester were evaluated. Each text was subjected to the Gunning fog index assessment methodology and the corpus methodology, changing the percentage of complex words to the percentage of unknown words. In the evaluation of first semester texts it was found that the average fog index was 29.25, and an average of 37.9 complex words, for these same texts was found a modified fog index of 18.62 and 5.1 unknown words. On the other hand, for the evaluation of the texts produced in the last semester, the average fog index was 27.55 and an average of 51.4 complex words, with the modified fog index was an average of 15.08 and 7.1 unknown words. With this study, aspects related to the best use of punctuation marks and the increase of vocabulary related to the profession can be identified in a quantitative way.