Warning
This article covers how Acrolinx calculates the Acrolinx Score with Targets enabled.
When you check with an Acrolinx Integration, you get an Acrolinx Score. The Acrolinx Score is a standardized score out of 100 that reflects the average of all goal scores. The higher the score, the higher the quality of the content.
Content scores help you quantify a document's quality and compare it with other documents. The Acrolinx Score reflects the overall quality of your content with a score between 1 and 100. You also get scores for how well you meet each of your goals, such as Correctness or Tone. The overall Acrolinx Score is simply an average of the scores for each goal you've set.
The Acrolinx Scorecard displays the Acrolinx Score and the goal scores with colored bars. These colors show the range of acceptability of the Acrolinx Score and the goal scores respectively. The color coding is as simple as a traffic light, so you can quickly see how you scored.
The scores can have one of three colors:
Color |
Description |
Acrolinx Score |
---|---|---|
Green |
Excellent |
Over 79 |
Yellow |
Acceptable |
Between 60 and 79 |
Red |
Unacceptable |
Under 60 |
You can configure if a goal counts toward the score. This helps writers prioritize issues, and it might be important if you use the Acrolinx Score as a quality gateway. When you create a Target, all goals are required by default. You can also set a goal to recommended, which means Acrolinx will show guidance for it but it won’t count toward your score.
To set a goal to Required or Recommended, follow these steps:
-
Navigate to Targets in your Acrolinx Dashboard.
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Hover over the Target you’d like to edit.
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Click the pen icon
Edit Target.
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Navigate to the relevant goal.
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Select Required or Recommended from the dropdown to the far right of the goal.
-
Click SAVE.
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Suppose you want your writers to deliver content that is grammatically correct and has no spelling issues. You aren't as strict about consistency, but some tips for writing consistently might be helpful. In this case, you'd create a Target with the goals Correctness and Consistency, and set Consistency to Recommended. Your writers will see the consistency issues, but these issues won't affect the Acrolinx Score.
The Acrolinx Score is the average of all the goal scores rounded to the nearest whole number. For example, suppose that you check a document, open your Scorecard, and see the following scores:
Goal |
Score |
---|---|
Words and Phrases |
59 |
Correctness |
71 |
Consistency |
33 |
Clarity |
75 |
Tone |
77 |
If you take the average of all the goal scores and round it to the nearest whole number, you get a final Acrolinx Score of 63.
Acrolinx calculates each individual goal score with the following formula:
Normalized document length / (Normalized document length + issue count)
This formula has the following variables:
-
Document length
The number of words in the document.
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Normalized document length
The number of words in the document divided by 75.
-
Issue count
The number of issues that Acrolinx found in the goal.
The following table shows you what the calculation steps would be for a document with 1000 words and 12 issues in Correctness.
Step |
Calculation |
Result |
---|---|---|
Calculate the normalized document length |
1000 / 75 |
13.33 |
Add the normalized document length and the issue count |
13.33 + 12 |
25.33 |
Divide the normalized document length by the result of the previous step |
13.33 / 25.33 |
0.5263 |
Express the result as a percentage and round it to the nearest whole number |
0.5263 * 100 |
53 |