Readability and Grade Levels

Post by **kailhofer** » November 28, 2004, 04:17:13 PM

For those out there who write and edit their work in Microsoft Word, you should be familiar with two items that appear when you check the spelling in your document: The first is the Flesch Reading Ease score, a complex voodoo formula based on length of sentences and average number of syllables. The second is the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score, which is another bit of voodoo math that is supposed to show what U.S. grade level a reader would need to be to understand what you've written. According to the help file, a standard document should have a reading ease of 60-70 (out of 100), and grade level of 7 to 8. I've always done fine on the reading ease gauge, but I have never in my twenty years of writing managed to get a story to read at anything close to an adult level. And this gets under my skin, because I'd like to think that I'm a smart guy. I have a degree in English from a good, respected school. I'm writing a story that when my daughter asks me what it is about, I have to tell her, "It's a little too old for you to understand, honey." I'm writing for Aphelion, which has a very literate audience of adult SF fanatics. --But I haven't been able to get that score above 6th grade for a story. Has anyone else faired better? Nate

November 29, 2004, 12:36:35 AM

So what would Umberto Eco be? Ph.D. level (in Linguistics, so you could read all those passages in the original Greek, Italian, German, ...)? I wonder how Word (what version? 2000? 2003? XP?) decides on the rating -- average number of syllables? Average vocabulary rating, with words scored according to some 1912 reading standard? As an experiment, you should try writing a paragraph in 'normal' language, then use the thesaurus and substitute the longest, most pretentious and obscure synonyms you can find. You'll probably find that Word gives a really high reading level score for something that nobody would WANT to read. Robert M.

November 29, 2004, 12:49:30 AM

If it makes you feel any better, John R. Murray's 'Ghost Rockets' Grade Level came out at 6.7, and that's with Russian words thrown in. (How does it score words not in its dictionary? High (assuming that they're specialized vocabulary) or low (assuming that they're mistakes)? Robert M.

Post by **kailhofer** » November 29, 2004, 07:04:57 PM

I wonder how Word (what version? 2000? 2003? XP?) decides on the rating -- average number of syllables?

The actual formula, according to the Word X for Mac help file, is: (.39 x ASL) + (11.8 x ASW) – 15.59 where: ASL = average sentence length (the number of words divided by the number of sentences) ASW = average number of syllables per word (the number of syllables divided by the number of words) If that's not crazy enough, the "readability formula" is: 206.835 – (1.015 x ASL) – (84.6 x ASW) where: ASL = average sentence length (the number of words divided by the number of sentences) ASW = average number of syllables per word (the number of syllables divided by the number of words) It does not, however, give an explanation of where the multipliers come from. It reminds me of the scene in Dead Poet's Society where they are charting the greatness of a poem... but it still bugs me anyway. Nate

Post by **kailhofer** » November 29, 2004, 08:36:09 PM

Lee, Dan E., (Captain Ahab/Star Trek's Kahn voice) It tasks me. It tasks me, and I shall have it. It calls for defeat because it is an arbitrary, rediculous gauge. It is a measurement that cannot be correct, one that should not be. It flies before my sensibilities as a false idol to be toppled, a mirage. I want to beat the system. At least once before I die, I want to write a good story that tops out both those gauges--because it seems impossible, and I like doing seemingly impossible things. The tiny income I have received over the last twenty years bears out that, clearly, I'm not in this for the money. At least, not yet. Therefore, anything which motivates me to try harder is a good thing. Nate PS Jaimie--LMAO. (This message was 70.9 for Readability & 6.1 for Grade Average.)

December 03, 2004, 12:18:50 AM

There is a very old and probably apocryphal story about early attempts at computerized translation. After much effort, an organization produced programs for translating English into Russian and for translating Russian into English. They decided that it was time for a public demonstration. "Could someone suggest a phrase to be translated?" "How about 'the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak'?" The programmers were quite pleased at this suggestion. All the words were in the dictionaries they had created; translation in either direction should be easy. They entered the old aphorism into the translation machine, and it soon produced a brief passage in Russian. A Russian-speaking member of the audience examined the translation and said, "It is a bit literal, but basically correct." For the benefit of the non-Russian-speakers, the programmers entered the Russian phrase back into the machine and ran the Russian-to-English translation program. The results made everyone laugh, and demonstrated the futility of any translation that functioned word by word, and did not understand idiomatic language or context: "The vodka is good, but the meat is rotten." Robert M.

December 07, 2004, 07:09:04 AM

... I once read that the smartest computer has the IQ of a cockroach. I do not, as a matter of habit, ask cockroaches to evaluate the quality of my writing.

--Jeff Williams

I can't remember: was archy the cockroach, or was he the cat? Robert M.

December 07, 2004, 03:07:46 PM

cockroaches...

Hey, if I can date them, and pretend to be interested in their mindless drivel, what's to say I can't get a critique too? That expensive dinner should buy me *something*!

Tsk, tsk. Does your husband know you're messing about with arthropods again? From cockroaches, you'll be moving up to Spider-man, and then ... D'rrish! Robert M.

December 07, 2004, 03:11:52 PM

Problem is that after dropping a C-note on you, a roach'll say anything to get into your story.

Dan, Dan, Dan. You weren't paying attention. Kate was buying expensive dinner for the cockroaches, not the other way around. And apparently, they weren't putting out. Not a single offer of proofreading, let alone commentary on style, characterization, or plotline. Robert M.

December 07, 2004, 05:32:36 PM

Wait a minute, it's unseemly if us cockroaches aren't paying for the chick. In fact, it's a threat to the moral fabric of society.

Anyway, did anyone run Kate's post through the readability/grade level program? Obviously, it far surpassed my comprehension level.

Trying to stay on topic,
Dan E.

Staying on topic is no way to earn that coveted next star, you fool. Besides, this close to the upload date for the next issue, lettercol content begins to randomize. Intellectual entropy rooolz, dood. Robert M.

Post by **kailhofer** » December 07, 2004, 10:51:06 PM

I once read that the smartest computer has the IQ of a cockroach. I do not, as a matter of habit, ask cockroaches to evaluate the quality of my writing.

You really should try to get more fun out of life. Given their relative invulnerability to extremes of cold, heat, and radiation, perhaps we should be asking a roach what it likes to read. If there were ever a nuclear winter, a few giant, mutant roaches may be the only beings left to read SF. I figure the regular, diminutive brand insect overlords and their Borg-like hive mind are bound to want romance novels instead. Why? Because they're trashy, or course. :) Nate

Boomer · Post by **Boomer** » April 30, 2005, 04:23:04 PM

Being the world's worse speller (have trophy to prove it) the invention of the word process, spell and grammar checker seemed like the second coming to me. That was until I discovered the pit falls therein. At best, the spell checker will catch maybe 60 to 70%, and the grammar checker about the same amount, so it was with a somewhat jaundice eye that I started looking the readability statistics. A little research on the subject shed some light on what they were thinking of, and I felt is wasn’t a bad idea. The loophole, if you can call it that, is the ever-changing style of writing. (And what editors consider worth publishing). The idea, I think, was to come up with a yardstick to gauge literacy in schoolchildren, which is all well and good, but somehow it got all turned around where writers were expected to gauge their work against that standard. I believe that most of us know this is an almost impossible task. I wonder if any one has ever run James Joyce ‘Ulysses’ through a grammar checker and looked at the readability index. I personally couldn’t get pass page two before I gave up. It baffled me how he ever got it published, but who am I to criticize someone else’s effort in writing. The other writer often quoted (thrown in my face, so to speak) is the old man himself Ernest Hemmingway as an example of ‘good’ writing. I tend to get a headache when I read him, as it’s like watching a ping-pong match. Short sentences small words and an index that tells me that a third grader can read and understand him. But that’s true of Dr. Zeus, but we don’t call that literature. At most, the readability index is nothing more that an interesting statistic for a writer to use, much the same as the spelling and grammar checking, but not the end all when it comes to writing. My teacher told me to write to the broadest audience as possible, which is all well and good, but some stories just can’t be written that way. Sci-Fi by its very nature involves concepts that are out of reach for many young readers, how young I won’t even try to guess. But then again how can anyone arbitrarily say this or that story can’t be read by a particular age group. I started with H.G.Wells ‘The Invisible Man’ (I won’t say what age) and at first it was hard going until the story grabbed me. Then I couldn’t stop, despite the hard (unrecognizable) words. I got around to understanding them later. Some very smart people have told me on many occasions that a story can be written in perfect English, grammatically correct, with no spelling errors yet is totally unreadable, completely boring, and un-publishable. So my advise, for what its worth, is to concentrate on telling a good yarn and don’t sweat the little stuff like readability indexes. And yes, I did run this through the spell/grammar checker ;D Flesch Reading Ease…….....61.1 Flesch-Kincaid Grade level….9.8

Aphelion

Readability and Grade Levels

Readability and Grade Levels

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