Are You Smarter than a Twelfth Grader?

There are lots of reasons to stay in school, and apparently, the ability to read this blog is one of them.  On a lark, I submitted Laboville for a "readability evaluation" courtesy of Juicy Studio.  [link].  The evaluation software "reads" a website and applies various algorithms to determine how "readable" it is.  The tests measure different factors, but all of them rely to some degree on the number of words in a sentence and the number of syllables in each word.  

The result is a number that is both meaningful and meaningless.  Meaningful in the sense that it gives some indication whether the language itself is accessible and at what level, but meaningless in the sense that "readability" is about both the language used and the concept being expressed, and these algorithms ignore the second part.

With all of that in mind, here are the results:

On the Gunning-Fog Index, Laboville rates a 12.43, which means you need that number of years of schooling to understand the language used here.  By comparison, the Wall Street Journal typically scores around 11, and the Times (London) scores around 14.  The Bible comes in at about 6.

On the Flesch Reading Ease scale, Laboville scored a 59.86 out of 100, with 100 being more readable, and 0 being less readable.  According to the description accompanying the results, writers should strive for results between 60 and 70, so Laboville is close to the statistically optimal range.

On the Flesch-Kincaid grade level, Laboville rates an 8.93, which means that the average ninth grader should be able to read and understand the text.

Two observations:  First, just for the sake of comparison, I tested several Supreme Court decisions for readability, and found that on average, they scored about a 10th Grade reading level on the Gunning-Fog index, and a reading ease score of approximately 59-62.  In an admittedly unscientific survey, I found that Justice Scalia scored the highest grade level of the current members of the Court, while Justice Thomas scored  the lowest (insert joke here).  Yet even there, Justice Scalia tended to score in the 10-11th grade level.

Second, I share Juicy Studio's sense of irony that the word "monosyllabic" has five syllables.