Especially in situations where I have given myself a deadline, I don’t normally think about how easy these articles are to read. I am more worried about the clarity of the points I am making – if I managed that, then legibility takes care of itself.
Apparently, the last paragraph scored 52.3 on the Flesch Reading Ease Test, producing a Flesch-Kincade reading grade level of 11.5, just below American college student level. It was “fairly difficult to read”.
Even more apparently, the paragraph just gone scored 31.9, placing it almost at college graduate level. It is “difficult to read”.
That last one went back down to 47.1 – still college level, but at the “easier” end of the scale.
Except for this sentence, this article scores 51.0 so far – we’re still going to college.
I only found out last week that Microsoft Word can calculate your document’s score on the Flesch Reading Ease Test, and I still don’t care for it now. Devised in the 1970s for use in evaluating technical, electronic and teaching documents in the United States Navy, it is an equation most often used by Government institutions to check the readability of their documents, weighing the number of words per sentence over a written work, and syllables per word. The higher the answer to the equation, the easier your document can be read: documents written in “plain English” will achieve a score over 60.
Of course, it doesn’t consider what those words say, only the numerical detail produced by the particular words used, a quick-and-dirty approach to checking your document, and one I won’t be using again because it doesn’t account for style, if I truly have a writing style.
The first article I published on this site in 2016, about the argument over how The Beatles got their name, had a readability score of 67.2, in the “plain English” bracket. For my previous piece about keeping the internet at bay to reach the college-level score of 44.8 is, to be honest, where I expect writing by a college graduate, and my consistently reaching that level confirms I must be more confident at reproducing that level for public consumption.
Interestingly, the essay scripts made for video, like my first about the HP-12C calculator, and my personal best video, about Memphis furniture, achieve a “lower” score – 56.0 and 54.9 respectively – because they were deliberately written to be more conversational in tone, using shorter sentences but, then again, the test isn’t made for the spoken word.
In short, I’ll concentrate on clarity.
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