Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Genea-Musings Readability

John Newmark on his Transylvanian Dutch blog has used the Readability tests found at Juicy Studio (http://juicystudio.com/services/readability.php) to determine the readability of his blog content. He found that his blog has a 6th to 10th grade reading level, about what Time and Newsweek magazines have.


What about Genea-Musings? What reading level are my posts? Am I too prolix? Too terse (yeah, that'll be the day!). Taking John's cue, I chose one month of posts from my Archives - June 2008 - that I think are fairly representative. Here is what I found:


Readability Results
The following table contains the readability results for http://www.geneamusings.com/2008_06_01_archive.html .

Total sentences -- 2888
Total words -- 39928
Average words per Sentence -- 13.83
Words with 1 Syllable -- 26476
Words with 2 Syllables -- 8041
Words with 3 Syllables -- 3670
Words with 4 or more Syllables -- 1741
Percentage of word with three or more syllables -- 13.55%
Average Syllables per Word -- 1.52


Gunning Fog Index -- 10.95
Flesch Reading Ease -- 64.55
Flesch-Kincaid Grade -- 7.69



The key readability scales are the last three:


The Gunning Fog Index relates the reading level to the years of school required to understand the content. My Fog Index of 10.95 means it takes a high school education to understand Genea-Musings - of course, many readers will debate that! 10.95 corresponds to the Wall Street Journal level of writing.


The Flesch Reading Ease of 64.55 is right in the middle of the 60 to 70 range recommended for authors to aim for. The Flesch-Kincaid Grade is another grade level indicator - my 7.69 means a 7th or 8th grade education is required.


What is the Gunning Fog Index for other bloggers (using their current blog page):


* Dick Eastman -- 10.29
* Leland Meitzler -- 10.10
* Juliana Smith -- 10.42
* DearMYRTLE -- 11.72
* Chris Dunham -- 12.22
* Terry Thornton - 9.73
* Jasia - 10.65

I wonder if any genea-blogger can top Chris's score?

Enough! Thanks, John, for finding another time-waster!

5 comments:

Tim Agazio said...

Randy,

Sheesh...At least 6th graders, and maybe "morons," can understand what I write...

Gunning Fog Index: 9.86
Flesch Reading Ease: 64.99
Flesch Reading Grade: 6.07

Tim

Bill West said...

Randy,
I used the last post on my blog, the "John Prescott" article, and
got these results:

Gunning Fog Index: 15.46
Flesch Reading Ease: 24.19
Flesch reading Grade:10.61

I could have sworn that Word or some other word processor program I had on an old computer had some sort of readability evaluation function but it was several long dead computers back.

Jasia said...

An interesting comparison Randy. Thanks for including me. I was a bit surprised with the results. Somehow I thought we all would have been writing more in Bill West's range.

Food for thought.

TheGeneticGenealogist said...

TGG got a Gunning Fog Index score of 13.19, which I'm going to try to lower. This is a great tool, thank you for sharing it.

DearMYRTLE said...

Geesh, ol' Myrt here hadn't thUnk A usEing such a way to e-val-U-ate my blog! --giggle-- Myrt :)