24 April 2005Eschewing obfuscationThirty-five articles from last week were up on the front page (plus the usual sidebar detritus) when I sent it through this Readability Test, and these are the results:
Total sentences: 1,201
Total words: 8,408 Average words per Sentence: 7.00 Words with 1 Syllable: 5,521 Words with 2 Syllables: 1,659 Words with 3 Syllables: 941 Words with 4 or more Syllables: 287 Percentage of words with three or more syllables: 14.61% Average Syllables per Word: 1.52 Gunning Fog Index: 8.64 Flesch Reading Ease: 70.84 Flesch-Kincaid Grade: 5.12 Robert Gunning's Fog Index is an estimate of educational accomplishment necessary to wade through this stuff: 8.64 suggests someone in the second semester of 9th grade might be able to decipher it. The two Flesch scores are derived similarly. The Reading Ease number falls on a descending scale of 100 to 1, where 100 is down below "One state, two state, red state, blue state" and 1 is beyond even an automatic Chomsky generator. The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level is a conversion of the Reading Ease figure to US grade-school levels; apparently Flesch and/or Kincaid have faith that the sixth-graders can handle this material, even though Gunning thinks it's almost out of middle-school range. Sudden fear: that a middle-school teacher will actually assign this drivel. Note: Two years ago, Oscar Jr. applied Flesch-Kincaid to a different set of articles and came up with a Grade Level of 9.6 for this site. (By way of the highly-readable Acidman.) Posted at 12:05 PM to BlogorrheaTrackBack: 4:43 PM, 24 April 2005 » Astronomically beyond cool from cut on the bias I love readability measures. It's my goal to shake loose as much readability as possible from as many high-flown concepts/articles......[read more] TrackBack: 12:30 PM, 25 April 2005 » Shakespeare I am not from This Blog Will be Deleted by Tomorrow I have learned that my writing is not complicated and obtuse enough, apparently. I have sent my deletable blog through this readability test I found via Dustbury and here are the results....[read more] |