Test the readability of your writing

[Lester Curtis]

I just looked at this:

http://www.dailywritingtips.com/whats-t ... r-writing/

and took the test (using samples of text from my novel), and it tells me I'm writing to a fifth- or sixth-grade level . . . ease of reading, 71.

And I thought I was writing for adults . . . well, I guess I have succeeded in making my story easy to read . . .

Try it!

[Lester Curtis]

Well, the more I think about it, the less impressed I am with its overall usefulness. Yes, it's a nice enough metric, but it doesn't tell you very much.

I clicked on the 'comment' link after doing the tests, and read the comments there. I got a little idea of the way the algorithm was set up; it looks at sentence length, paragraph length, and so on. I don't think it analyzes the content very deeply. It does what it does, but it doesn't do a lot. It's certainly no substitute for review by human readers. And, if you got poor scores from it, you'd have to figure out on your own how to improve them.

I have to think that Hemmingway and Dr. Seuss would likely have similar scores on this thing.

The 'comment' function is disabled now, FYI.