I clicked on the graphic and ran my own blog through the program. The Biskup Family blog text was determined to be at the POST-GRAD COLLEGE reading level. (Test your own blog's readability here or here.) Well, needless to say my EGO became extremely curious and I began to contemplate, "How does one get a GENIUS score? Who came up with this anyway? Why do I even care? Oh, no... How long will I spend researching this? I have to do the laundry!"
I immediately began searching the INTERNET and this is what I discovered. There are a few different readability scoring methods, with the main one being called the Flesch reading ease score. It is based on a range of 0-100, with lower values for harder text and higher values for easier text.
The score is determined by this formula.
I continued searching and found various sites where you can paste in your text and it will automatically score it and give you the Flesch reading ease score as well as other scores from other methods, like SMOG and Gunning-Fog Index.
Try for yourself here or here.
Then I read this: "Readability is a basic design goal for anything meant to be read by a general population. Text meant for a general readership should have a reading grade level of at most 8. Better still would be a reading grade level of 6 or 7."
And here I was going for the GENIUS level. LOL!
Of course, since these tools are mathematically based, readability tests are unable to determine the likelihood that the document is comprehensible, interesting, or enjoyable. It is totally possible to obtain "good" (i.e. low level) readability scores with gobbledygook, provided that the content contains short sentences made up of monosyllabic words. Or you can obtain a higher score simply by increasing your use of multisyllabic words (e.g. intergenerational, harmonious, enlightenment, unimaginable) or even just making long lists of words with multiple syllables (so-called "complex" words). Hey, I just did that and completely increased my score!
And obviously, there are other factors involved in readability (especially on the web), including layout and design, which cannot be determined using these various readability tests. Documents aimed at a higher level may require specific background knowledge, which cannot be determined by the tests, etc.
So there you have it. I invite you to figure out what grade level you are writing for! It's pretty interesting!
FYI: This post received the following scores according to the script that is provided at the ILoveJackDaniels.com website:
Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease: 40
Ideally, web page text should be around the 60 to 80 mark on this scale. The higher the score, the more readable the text.
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 11
Ideally, web page text should be around the 6 to 7 mark on this scale. The lower the score, the more readable the text.
Gunning-Fog Index: 17
Ideally, web page text should be between 11 and 15 on this scale. The lower the score, the more readable the text. (Anything over 22 should be considered the equivalent of post-graduate level text).
Notes:
Average syllables per word: 1.83
Average words per sentence: 11.67
I trust you are all geniuses so reading this post is a breeze for y'all. LOL!!
Click here for an interesting article on the scores of past inaugural addresses.
From the article:
Reading Grade Level
yourDictionary.com's analysis showed that in terms of Grade Level Reading Appropriateness, Bush's scored 7.5, which ranked him closely with Eisenhower's 2nd (7.5), Nixon's first (7.6), Johnson (7.0), and Franklin D. Roosevelt's 4th (8.1). In contrast, Clinton's two addresses scored about the 9th grade level (9.4 and 8.8).
Before 1900, every inaugural address was ranked at the 12th grade level or higher, with the sole exception of Lincoln's 2nd at 11.5. The highest scores since 1900 were Theodore Roosevelt's 11.8 Richard Nixon's 2nd at 11.6, Hoover's 11.4, and Kennedy's 11.3. The lowest score was that of President's father, George H. W. Bush scored at 6.1.
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