The Readability and Grade Level scores produced by VisibleThread products make it very easy to measure how clear your content is. However there are times when you must use complex words or phrases that will negatively impact these scores. For example you may be working with content related to medical professionals and have several references to ‘anesthesiology’ in your text. Repeated use of this multi syllabic word will have a negative effect on your Readability Scores.

You can now exclude these words from your Readability and Grade Level calculation by adding them to an ‘ignore list’.

The distributed problem

Now with the Ignore List present in each of our products, customers are needing to synchronise their Ignore Lists to ensure accuracy when using the full suite of VisibleThread tools. As of now each of our products work in isolation to ensure ease of use. The mechanism for ensuring that customers can keep their Ignore List up to date across products is through the use of Importing/Exporting through CSV.

How to effectively Import and Export across VT products. 

Below is what our standard Ignore List editor (VTDocs) looks like. Pay attention to the Export and Import buttons.

Here we will go ahead and click 'Export to CSV' which will give us a CSV file containing our Ignore List. A sample file can be found here: ReadabilityIgnoreList.csv

Now we can take this file and import it into another one of the VT products. For an example we will import into VTReadability. Below is an empty VTReadability Ignore List. 

Once we have selected our desired CSV, for this exercise we will use the sample ReadabilityIgnoreList.csv, the Ignore List should look like this in the Ignore List editor:

Quick Tip

If your business has purchased two or more of VisibleThread's products it may be worth nominating one of the power users as the owner of the Ignore List. An internal business process can be formed where users will send this owner nominated words to be put into the Ignore List. This guardian will then solely take the responsibility of importing the Ignore List and maintaining it across products.