Fifth Grade (barely)!

April 28th, 2005

Filed under: Comics, General

From Geek Press, here’s a site that runs several “readability tests” on your website.

Reading level algorithms only provide a rough guide, as they tend to reward short sentences made up of short words. Whilst they’re rough guides, they can give a useful indication as to whether you’ve pitched your content at the right level for your intended audience.

Admittedly, these algorithms aren’t perfect and I’ve found they’re quite picky about HTML (sorry, Ken). With blogs, a site’s scores will change as new material is added. Still, it certainly provides food for thought.

Just for fun (and to kill time), I thought it would it interesting to see how certain comic blogs ranked according to the grade level required to understand them. Depending on your point of view, a high or low score may be good (or more than likely you really don’t care).

The Shrew Review 9.04
Crocodile Caucus 7.69
Suspension of Disbelief 6.96
Postmodernbarney 6.45
Dave’s Long Box 6.31
Precocious Curmudgeon 6.24
Fanboy Rampage 6.22
Cognitive Dissonance 6.20
Blog this, Pal! 5.88
Neilalien 5.82
Peiratikos 5.65
Brill Building 5.65
The Comic Treadmill 5.36
Polite Dissent 5.23
Bloggity-Blog-Blog-Blog 4.25
Progressive Ruin 3.93

15 Responses to “ Fifth Grade (barely)! ”

  1. Jog
    April 28th, 2005 at 11:33 pm

    Very interesting stuff… I got a 8.28, and my Fog Index says I’m comperable to the Wall Street Journal… and apparently I use an average of almost 16 words per sentence, which sounds sort of high but I think it’s accurate…

  2. Johnny Bacardi
    April 29th, 2005 at 12:13 am

    I got a Fog Index of 8.34! Go me!

  3. Scott
    April 29th, 2005 at 11:15 am
    Official Comment

    Fiore’s Motime Like the Present clocks in at 9.37, which comes as o surprise.

    My score of fifth grade actually makes me feel like I’m accomplishing my goal. If I can explain medical topics so that a ten year old can understand them, perfect! Same goes for my fellow grade-schoolers Laura and Mike. A low grade score doesn’t mean that their writing is any lower quality than anyone elses, it’s just more accessible.

  4. The Comics Shrew
    April 29th, 2005 at 11:45 am

    Personally, I’m more amused that the index rates Reader’s Digest above Mark Twain and the Bible on the difficulty-meter. (That I can’t get through some of those magazines and newspapers without throwing them across the room in disgust not being a factor in their score.)

    I have an over-fondness for semi-colons and long sentences and that skews my score more than anything else. Am I writing over the heads of my audience? I hope not. I’ve got a mostly adult audience who can presumably handle a mostly adult vocabulary. Which is not to say that I haven’t made someone run for a dictionary once or thrice, but exercise is good for you.

    Nevertheless, I shall bask in my moment of faux-intellectual superiority. And maybe look for a picture of the Ultra-Humanite in his Dolores Winters days…

  5. Mikester
    April 29th, 2005 at 12:27 pm

    Must…use…more…$10…words….

  6. Shane Bailey
    April 29th, 2005 at 1:47 pm

    Near-Mint Heroes scores:

    Gunning Fog Index 6.30
    Flesch Reading Ease 80.37
    Flesch-Kincaid Grade 3.70

    I do have my very eloquent posts about the Serenity trailer and Rob Leifeld
    on the first page at the moment so that could deter my score from being higher.

    :)

  7. Scott
    April 29th, 2005 at 2:01 pm
    Official Comment

    I think just mentioning Liefeld knocks it down 2 grades

  8. David Campbell
    April 29th, 2005 at 2:45 pm

    yay imat 6th grayd reading levul!!! Ha ha, Neilalien, I beet you!

  9. H
    April 29th, 2005 at 10:10 pm

    Darn that Mag! His 2.36 Fog Index writing is dragging down my 8.36 cred. I am never going to get an invite to the Algonquin Roundtable at this rate.

  10. David Fiore
    April 29th, 2005 at 11:26 pm

    that’s a really interesting tool Scott–and I quite agree (despote Motime’s obnoxious rating!) that the ideal would be to attack the really complex subjects with sentences that just about anyone could read… this is why I have to get out of academia!

    Dave

  11. Rick!
    April 30th, 2005 at 1:47 am

    Woo-hoo. Dark, But Shining is cranking along at a 6.82 grade level (With a Fog level of 9.67, which puts us alongside…most popular novels? I guess that’s swell.)

    Of course, 5.82 of those grade levels can be chalked up to Kevin and Sam…

  12. Nik
    April 30th, 2005 at 8:31 pm

    Eep, Spatula Forum ranks 8.45 on the Fog scale. Me am smarter than me thought.

  13. Greg Burgas
    May 1st, 2005 at 2:19 pm

    I got a 8.59 on the Fog Index. I have no idea what that means. My Flesh-Kinkaid grade is 5.72. Again, no idea. Less than 10% of my words have three or more syllables, though, so I’ll have to bug Dave Fiore for his thesaurus. (Just kidding, Dave!)

  14. Gordon
    May 1st, 2005 at 4:22 pm

    I redid my page, because – let’s face it – I don’t believe I scored that high. My new scores for Blog This, Pal are

    Gunning Fog Index 8.95
    Flesch Reading Ease 72.04
    Flesch-Kincaid Grade 6.14

    I’m really glad – if I’m writing as if I’m writing scholarly papers, then I’m in trouble.

    Oh, and Mike – try using “sociopathic”, “naltrexone” and “neuropathic” in your blog. That’s 3 words x $10 words = $30 you owe me.

  15. Tom Bondurant
    May 1st, 2005 at 5:11 pm

    Comics Ate My Brain got a Fog of 10.31, Flesch of 66.21, and Flesch-Kinkaid of 7.21. Yikes!

    Only one response seems appropriate:

    “I am so smart! S-M-R-T!”

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