Nuts and Bolts: ATOS.

When I was very young I used to work out which books were easy enough for me by the size of the print.

Nowadays, however, things are different, because we now have ATOS. ATOS is a computer program which can analyse the text of a passage or whole book and assign it a difficulty number.

It's very important to note that the ATOS analysis doesn't take into account what the text is about, or how long it is, and therefore it tells you nothing about anything sophisticated, like a book's theme. What it does tell you is how difficult it is on average to read the words and understand a sentence.

Some of the results are surprising. Roger Hargreaves' wonderful little book for infants Mr Greedy, for instance, is measured to be a book of the same level of difficulty as Malorie Blackman's teenager Noughts and Crosses books, and only a little easier than John Steinbeck's decidedly adult The Grapes of Wrath.

Yes, yes, this result is basically nonsense, but it's interesting to know that simplicity and directness of language isn't any barrier to communicating complex, sophisticated, vivid, and wise stories.

But then I suppose we always knew that long sentences and long words are often a means of disguising a fundamental lack of sense, didn't we.

You can measure the ATOS difficulty of any text HERE.

Word To Use Today: how about a short one in a short sentence? I think, so I am will do.

By the way, the two hardest books, as measured by the ATOS formula, are Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift and Don Quixote* by Miguel de Cervantes, both of which I've rewritten for Oxford Children's Books.

I feel really rather proud of that.

*I don't know if this was measured in the original Spanish version or one in English.