I'm in the middle of doing my Maths coursework at GCSE. What I have to do is take a sample or word and line lengths from two books and also amount of syllables per word.

Anyway, I have to use this to determine which book is harder to read. My maths teacher told me about some scoring system or something that can use the kind of data I have and turn it into a score that would show hard the book is to read. But being the clutz that I am, I've managed to lose the piece of paper that I wrote it all down on. I was wondering if anyone knows what I'm talking about and could point me in the direction of information on the scoring system I'm looking for. Thanks.

PS: It's not a computer program, it's a mathematical process or something.

Although I can't help, I do have a question:

How does the data you are going to be collected relate to how "hard" a book is to read?

I really have no idea, I'm just doing what I'm told...

The exact hypothesis is 'How does the amount of words in a line and the amount of letters and syllables per word (on average) show the difference in reading difficulty between an adult fiction book and a children's fiction book'. So I'm guessing it's just to show that the words are longer and harder to read in an adult book than a children's book... the point in it isn't really how hard the theory is to prove I don't think. more to see how well you can present it.

Presumably it's estimated that more complex words = harder to read than simpler words.

Sounds rather arbitrary to me.

Yeah that's what I thought but it wasn't my choice. It feels vague really, and hard to prove because of it. I'd rather have something like work out a formula for such and such but ah well.

I had a similar assignment for GCSE maths and GCSE stats, I think the curriculum for it is just kind of borked in general and they still haven't managed to fix it yet.

Oh god... I have one word to say to anything involving Mathematical Statistics calculations. TWITCH!!!
I loved Algebra, geometry, trig, calc, physics, chemistry... but Stats was a bloody nightmare.

Likewise. Presumably though it's more about the practical use of the maths they've been taught than the actual utility of the statistics they come up with.

I think you are missunderstanding the assignment. It sounds more like you take an "adult level" book, and a "child level" book, and do statistical analzyis on the books and see if Word length or amount of words per line is any indication of difficulty and to determine weather or not there is a statistical corralation.

I don't think anybody is claiming complex words are harder to read, rather they want to see the data given one book that is known to be harder to read than the other.

Do a search on google using the words "Statistics, reading, difficulty, and word count" That should find you what you need.