Step 2: Prepare your text for measurement

Spanish Lexile Analyzer®

In preparing a file for Spanish Lexile measurement, your two basic objectives are to:

preserve the prose sentences and the words within them

remove non-prose content from within your text (see table below)

The Spanish Lexile Analyzer determines sentence length through recognition of sentence endings, so sentences must be conventionally punctuated to be recognized. Likewise the Analyzer determines word frequency by recognizing correctly spelled, well-formed words. Otherwise you won't get a useful measure.

Here are some general guidelines for removing non-prose within your sample text:

You should measure:

You should not measure:

Paragraphs of prose
Captions that are complete sentences
Bulleted/numbered lists in which the list items are complete sentences
Dialogue, sentences within quotation marks
Numbers and dates
Acronyms
Foreign words
Names
Parenthetical phrases or clauses within sentences

Incomplete sentences
Sentences with unconventional punctuation
Page headers and footers, page numbers
Frontmatter (forewords, prologues, prefaces, tables of contents)
Backmatter (afterwords, epilogues, glossaries, indexes, bibliographies)
Chapter and section titles
Captions that are incomplete sentences
Headings and sub-headings
Bulleted/numbered lists in which the list items are incomplete sentences
The leading name and colon conventionally used in interview notation
Footnotes and endnotes
Poetry/song extracts
URLs
Tables and graphs
Abbreviations
Phonetic pronunciation guides
Parentheses which contain complete sentences

Additional considerations should be made when editing a text for measurement. Historical notes, introductions, "About the author" pieces, and previews of the next book in a series should typically be removed. Such text is often written separately from the main text. However, such decisions should be carefully considered while preparing your sample text for analysis. Some frontmatter and backmatter may be a legitimate part of the larger text and should be included. As a general guideline, if text appears to be written by the same author for the same audience, then it should be included for Spanish Lexile analysis.