unting every syllable in a passage in order to obtain a valid
measure of its semantic difficulty. I have found a law relating the
number of syllables in a passage to the percentage of polysyllabic
words, defined as words of three or more syllables. For practical
purposes, the total number of syllables per 100 words may be calculated
by this rule of thumb: multiply the number of polysyllabic
word by 3 and add 112