Friday, February 20, 2009

How readable is this dreck?

On a blog I read occasionally, the blogger found a website to test the readability of a website. Naturally, I was curious about my writing. Here are the results:

Readability Results
The following table contains the readability results for http://mossagate.blogspot.com/ .

Reading Level Results Summary Value
Total sentences 640
Total words 2204
Average words per Sentence 3.44
Words with 1 Syllable 1170
Words with 2 Syllables 411
Words with 3 Syllables 223
Words with 4 or more Syllables 400
Percentage of word with three or more syllables 28.27%
Average Syllables per Word 1.93
Gunning Fog Index 12.68
Flesch Reading Ease 39.78
Flesch-Kincaid Grade 8.57

Gunning-Fog Index
The following is the algorithm to determine the Gunning-Fog index.

Calculate the average number of words you use per sentence.
Calculate the percentage of difficult words in the sample (words with three or more syllables).
Add the totals together, and multiply the sum by 0.4.
Algorithm: (average_words_sentence + number_words_three_syllables_plus) * 0.4
The result is your Gunning-Fog index, which is a rough measure of how many years of schooling it would take someone to understand the content. The lower the number, the more understandable the content will be to your visitors. Results over seventeen are reported as seventeen, where seventeen is considered post-graduate level.

Typical Fog Index Scores Fog Index Resources
6 TV guides, The Bible, Mark Twain
8 Reader's Digest
8 - 10 Most popular novels
10 Time, Newsweek
11 Wall Street Journal
14 The Times, The Guardian
15 - 20 Academic papers
Over 20 Only government sites can get away with this, because you can't ignore them.
Over 30 The government is covering something up


What I find quite odd is that I am as inclined to use FOUR syllable words as I am to use TWO. Guess that law school education is paying off!

Here's the link to test a website: http://juicystudio.com/services/readability.php#readweb

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