I installed a wordpress plugin called FD Word Statistics which applies three metrics on the backend and is supposed to help me gauge the readability of my blog posts. The first two metrics – Gunning-Fog and Flesch-Kincaid – measure things like sentence length and word bigitude and then crank out a figure that’s supposed to represent the number of years of education my readers will need in order to understand the post. The third metric – the Flesch score – is expressed as a percentage; the closer to a hundred, the more readable the writing.
So how does my blog stack up? Let’s check out some samples.
First up is a piece I did on queer theology and mental health for a master’s degree.
Here are the scores: Sentences: 144 Fog: 13.8 Kincaid: 10.3 Flesch: 51
Not bad for an quasi-academic piece.
How about a poetry review I did a couple months ago?
Sentences: 114 Fog: 12.5 Kincaid: 9.1 Flesch: 57
Compare that with a poem called Watermelon:
Sentences: 20 Fog: 8.9 Kincaid: 6.4 Flesch: 75
Ted Hughes’ poem Crow’s Playmates is more readable than mine:
Sentences: 11 Fog: 7.2 Kincaid: 4.8 Flesch: 82
And then I turn the metric to a chapter from my serialized novel, Hogtown! This chapter is a monologue by a character named Johnny. It’s a single sentence running on for more than 4000 words. According to my readability plugin, you need at least 800 years of education to understand this chapter and it has a readability factor of -1982. Yes, that’s expressed as a negative percentage. Fuck!