Sunday, April 24, 2005

10:28 PM Today’s entry in the Crosswalk weblog is called The Reverse Broadcast Experiment. 9:38 PM I found a website that scores the readability of web pages. Here are the results for this blog: Total sentences 242 Total words 3,010 Average words per Sentence 12.44 Words with 1 Syllable 2,042 Words with 2 Syllables 670 Words with 3 Syllables 243 Words with 4 or more Syllables 55 Percentage of word with three or more syllables 9.90% Average Syllables per Word 1.44 Gunning Fog Index 8.94 Flesch Reading Ease 72.48 Flesch-Kincaid Grade 6.24 The Gunning Fog Index is a measure of how many years of schooling it would take to understand the content. Here are some typical Fog Index scores: 8 Reader’s Digest 8 – 10 Most popular novels 10 Time, Newsweek 11 Wall Street Journal So if you can read John Grisham or Nicholas Sparks, you should have no trouble with this blog. Reading ease is figured on a 0-100 scale, with a higher number being better. Authors are urged to aim for 60-70, which means my writing should be easy to understand. Ditto for the Flesch-Kincaid scale, which measures what grade you should have finished in order to understand what is written. All of this doesn’t mean much, but it’s a fun diversion on a Sunday afternoon.