Friday, March 25, 2005

Interesting article about The Flesch-Kincaid Readability scale. Basic idea is that bestselling writers are, intentionally or not, writing prose that's readable at a fourth grade reading level. Whereas the rest of us are, tragically, writing at an eight grade reading level. Which is, I suppose, why people are reading the bestsellers and not thou et moi.

I ran what I've got of the book so far through the checker, and the results are:

Characters per word: 4.4
Reading ease: 69.9
Grade level: 7.2

Somehow though I suspect that with an audience of writers, an eight grade level isn't stretching it too far...

On the other hand, my novel is a tad easier to read:

Reading ease: 86.9
Grade Level: 3.8 (!)

10:16 AM

1 Comments:

I ran your your post through the readability checker:

Grade Level: 8.5

I'm feeling pretty smart right now because I understood every word of it. :)

By  Anonymous, at 12:07 PM  

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