Surfside Beach, SC -- (ReleaseWire) -- 07/10/2006 --You think you are writing a masterpiece, but your readers think otherwise. Your masterpiece is no masterpiece at all; it is a slushpile of difficult words, sentences and phrases. Your readers feel alienated, confused and bored. Your masterpiece suddenly becomes a discarded piece of trash. Had you known the reading level of your masterpiece ahead of time, you could have rewritten your masterpiece for the right audience.

If you want to write clearly and ensure your readers can understand what you write, you need to find out the reading level of your materials as part of your writing process, not after you distribute your materials, according to Brian Konradt, founder of LiteracyNews.com.

Mr. Konradt has created a free Readability Analysis program that analyzes text and gives the reading and grade level of the text. The free program is available at http://literacynews.com/readability/readability_analyses.php

“Knowing the reading level of your materials ahead of time helps you to determine if you are writing for the proper grade level of your readers,” according to Konradt. “Our program will help you to determine if you are using too many difficult words, or too many long sentences, or words with too many syllables. Then you can edit, trim and substitute your words, phrases and sentences into something your readers can understand easily.”

LiteracyNews.com’s Readability Analysis uses three popular readability formulas to determine the reading level of materials; they include Flesch Reading Ease, Fog Scale Level, and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level. All three programs calculate the number of sentences, words, syllables, and characters and use a mathematical formula to determine a grade level.

Mr. Konradt launched LiteracyNews.com ( http://www.literacynews.com ) in 2006 to empower and inspire literacy leaders and literacy educators to strive harder in helping people improve their literacy skills. Mr. Konradt is also founder of LousyWriter.com ( http://www.lousywriter.com ), a free web resource that teaches writers and non-writers the mechanics of good writing.