Testing Readability
Another post courtesy of Lorelle. This one’s not a Blogging Challenge as such, it is a test of the readability of your blog. I’m not going to go into the specifics. Lorelle has done a really good job (as usual!) of explaining so go read the post to get the full gen.
Most of the results for the tests are irrelevant when testing a blog post. This is because the Juicy Studio tester looks at the content of the whole page rather than just the relevant post. For example, I ran the test on What I did on my summer holiday, a fairly short and recent post about Theo Walcott. These were the results:
There is definitely not 91 sentences in that post! The three results that are most interesting are the last three – Gunning Fog Index, Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade. The three results mean:
I ran the test on five other posts, with the results as follows:
Tagging Keywords and Permalinks
Looking at those results I am fairly happy with the readability of all of them. The Gunning Fog Index result on Blog About What You Know is a little higher as it is a more technical post about photography. Still, it’s nowhere near the 17 that would require post grad schooling to understand!
Just for reference I ran Coldplay’s X&Y through the tester too:
This result gives an indication of why the song means so much to so many people!
The tests do beg questions though:
1. If this is a decent level for a reader, what does it say about me as the writer? That I have a natural ability to write easy to read posts, or that with my level of education (Technical to degree level) I write like a kid?
2. While the tests are fantastic against a set scale, what do the readers of my blog think of my writing? Set scales are fantastic for measurement, but we often find that in the “real world” the opinion is much different!
Luminus on July 14th, 2006
I guess the problem with such tools is that for them to work, you need to make a couple of assumptions. It’s quite cool, but I agree it does beg a whole lot of questioins.
Aside from thew questions you’ve asked, there’s also the fact that spelling, grammar and language aren’t really a factor, as running the test on non-english blogs still gives ok results.