Tuesday, September 4, 2007
Readability Scores
My interest was peaked after doing the readability scores for my blog. I was amazed at what they measured, but sceptical about how they measured it. Just out of curiousity I decided to delete all the referenced author's names from the main text of my blog, and to run a readibility analysis- it had risen by 7 points!
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3 comments:
This is interesting - could you add this as a comment to your main blog? Or make a comment on you main blog which links to this post.
If you have any more facts, figures, or examples, they would also be useful.
The main one of interest I think is Flesch-Kincaid Reading Grade - i.e., the one that ideally is as low as 12, but is often as high as 16 or 18.
When you deleted the citations, what difference does it make to this readability stat for your essay?
Of course this is just ONE indicator of readability - and it is not foolproof.
Interested in your thoughts.
I did the same thing with mine and got a similar result, I assume it's because the in text references don't make up proper sentences??
The Flesch-Kincaid Reading Grade stayed the same after the authors were deleted actually- 12.0.
I think the reading ease score takes into account non-meaning words into its readability. For example one of my intext references was: Van de Harreveld, van der Pligt & de Vries (1999). They are, to start with, not even english words (Swiss I beleive), aswell as quite long.
The Flesch-Kincaid Reading Grade seems to be the less tempremental score.
I remember hearing when George Dubya was first elected that he was averaging a sixth grade vocabulary in his public speeches. I wonder if this was a result of using the Flesch-Kincaid on the speeches transcripts.
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