Cliopatria's readability

by Cliopatria

Readability Results for http://hnn.us/blogs/2.html

Readability ResultsSummary	Value
Total sentences	810
Total words	10,968
Average words per Sentence	13.54
Words with 1 Syllable	6,455
Words with 2 Syllables	2,448
Words with 3 Syllables	1,376
Words with 4 or more Syllables	689
Percentage of word with three or more syllables	18.83%
Average Syllables per Word	1.66
Gunning Fog Index	12.95
Flesch Reading Ease	52.44
Flesch-Kincaid Grade	9.31

Interpreting the Results

I ran the scores for March and February, and they came out pretty much the same (a few tenths difference on Fog and Flesch-Kincaid, a few points on Flesch Reading Ease). These results put us roughly between the Wall Street Journal and the major British dailies on Gunning-Fog, well below the"enouraged" sixties on Reading Ease. Curiously, though Flesch-Kincaid and Fog are both supposed to produce approximate grade levels, and they are over three years apart. So much for quantitative measurement.

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More Comments:

Richard Holmes - 4/22/2005

Congrats to all 18 of you, these are impressive stats. The posts in this space are consistently well-written and informative.

Jonathan Dresner - 4/22/2005

Yeah, I thought of that, too.

There's no easy way I could think of, short of entering individual post URLs (which doesn't seem to work too well, actually), but some of us have independent blogs: Frog in a Well comes out a bit more readable and less foggy than the Cliopatria norm; Tim's Easily Distracted comes out with a Gunning Fog Index of 14.85, a Flesch Reading Ease of 50.42 and a Flesch-Kincaid Grade of 11.25, all significantly more complex linguistically than the Cliopatria norms. Early Modern Notes is easy on the language centers of the brain, as is Hugo Schwyzer (Both exercise other portions more vigorously), etc., etc.

Ralph E. Luker - 4/22/2005

It would be interesting to see a breakdown by individual posters at Cliopatria. I'll bet you that Tim Burke uses more three syllable words than I do!