">
Seriously, without knowing what this little test takes into account, I'm not putting much stock in it. True readability assessments are based on much more than just vocabulary. If this one considers nothing more than that, I could easily envision a blog that is incoherently written and riddled with poor sentence structure nevertheless scoring at a high reading level simply due to the presence of a few big words. Conversely, I think it's possible to use "big words" in a reader-friendly way, defining them either explicitly or through context.
Still, this was a fun diversion. For some reason I couldn't make the link above live, so if you'd like to run this test on your own blog, click here.
2 comments:
Wellllll, you see, Cheryl, I am capable not only of reading genius-level, post-grad level, and collegiate level material, but I am also capable of pre-digesting material to present in a manner comprehensible to first-graders. Mwwwaaa haaa haaa!
(Can you tell I'm getting a little punchy? I've been a little short of adult conversation today, except for trying to convince my dad that he's in a hospital room and not stuck in a cold garage. And I'm not sure that constitutes real Adult Conversation.)
Huh? Why did I come here? Oh yeah. To assure you that I'd still read your blog. :-)
This reminds me of the "writing level" assessment that MS Word does as part of the word count tool. Some friends and I tested it out once, and sure enough, it just calculates average word length. Even if it's gibberish, as long as that gibberish averages 6 letters per word, congratulations, you're writing at a 12th-grade level.
Post a Comment