Text Profiling
The four types of words categorized by the Text Profiler are:
Type
1: BNC 1-2000 - Two thousand most common words in English according
to Nation's British National Corpus (BNC)-based lists.
Type
2: AWL words - 570 high-frequency general academic words on Coxhead’s
Academic Word List (AWL).
Type
3: AWL & 2000 (Overlaps) – words that appear on both the AWL
and BNC 1-2000 lists.
Type
4: Off-list words that do not appear in the first 3 categories. These
words include names, places, discipline-related concepts and
technical terms.
I used the Text Profiler to compare four articles about electricity. They are listed below in order of decreasing complexity. I had hoped to find a greater range, but perhaps the subject does not lend itself to simplicity without too great a sacrifice in content.
I would use this activity with eighth graders doing research projects on-line. Sometimes students have difficultly determining whether or not material matches their level of comprehension. The Text Profiler sorts the words of a text into four categories, from very common to technical, giving readers a good idea of how complex the text is. 
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