The Blog Readability Test – What’s Your Score?
Recently I’ve been working on a Social Media Marketing e-book and a friend who’s editing it sent it back with an important comment – not everyone will be able to understand it at its current level of readability, otherwise known as the level of education required for people to understand the text.
As soon as my friend made this comment, I realized I hadn’t thought about my audience’s reading level for years, since I first started writing professionally. While most of us take into consideration the audience for whom we’re writing, e.g. moms, teens, technopiles, etc, we forget that any writing we do geared towards the general public should be readable by everyone.
A couple sites like http://www.addedbytes.com/readability/ and http://www.criticsrant.com/bb/reading_level.aspx offer excellent tools for finding out the readability of your blog or web content.
Added Bytes uses these specific methods of scoring:
Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease (Wikipedia) -61.5
Aim for 60 to 80. The higher the score, the more readable the text. Long words affect this score significantly more than they do the grade level score.
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (Wikipedia): 8.3
A note on the Flesch/Flesch–Kincaid Readability Tests – These tests are designed to indicate comprehension difficulty when reading a passage of contemporary academic English. There are two tests, the Flesch Reading Ease, and the Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level. Although they use the same core measures (word length and sentence length), they have different weighting factors, so the results of the two tests correlate imperfectly: a text with a higher score on the Reading Ease test over another text may have a lower score on the Grade Level test.
Gunning-Fog Score (Wikipedia): 11.7
The fog index is generally used by people who want their writing to be read easily by a large segment of the population. Texts that are designed for a wide audience generally require a fog index of less than 12. For texts that require a close to universal understanding generally requires an index less than 8.
Coleman-Liau Index (Wikipedia): 11.4
The Coleman-Liau Index is a readability test designed by Meri Coleman and T. L. Liau to gauge the understandability of a text. Unlike other tests, Coleman-Liau relies on characters instead of syllables per word. Although opinion varies on its accuracy as compared to the syllable/word and complex word indices, characters are more readily and accurately counted by computer programs than are syllables.
SMOG Index (Wikipedia): 8.9
SMOG (Simple Measure of Gobbledygook) is a readability formula that estimates the years of education needed to completely understand a piece of writing.SMOG was published by G. Harry McLaughlin in 1969 as a more accurate and more easily calculated substitute for the Gunning-Fog Index.
Automated Readability Index (Wikipedia): 7.6
Approximation of number of years of education required* to read text.
Like Coleman-Liau, this test relies on characters instead of syllables per word. The minimum approximate grade level needed to comprehend the text is around 8th grade. A score of 8.2, for instance, should easily be understood by the average 14-year-old (8th grade typically aged between 13-14 in the U.S.).
I looked at these examples and their corresponding overall grades:
The Authority Domains Blog – College Undergraduate Level
Aaron Wall’s SEOBOOK Blog – Junior High Level
Mashable - Genius Level
Seth Godin’s Blog – Elementary School Level
Scobleizer – Junior High Level
Note: Mashable is written by different writers, so their scores will vary. This makes a big difference. The five most recent posts I checked had alternating Junior High and High School Level text, much different from the blog’s overall Genius rating.
Now lets take a look at Technorati’s top ten most popular blogs on the web:
Huffington Post – Junior High Level
Gizmodo – Junior High Level
TechCrunch – Junior High Level
Engadget – High School Level
Ars Technica – Postgrad College Level
BoingBoing – High School Level
Lifehacker – Undergrad College Level
Google Blog – Postgrad College Level
Daily Kos – High School Level
Smashing Magazine – Genius Level
Note: The majority of these blogs are written by more than one person which in all likelihood raises their scores. Regardless, 60% are at a high school reading level or below, which indicates that the easier they are to read, the more popular they are. The top three are at Junior High Level, with two of them being tech or gadget related blogs. Is this significant? I think so. I also used this tool http://www.criticsrant.com/bb/reading_level.aspx .
Basically, what it comes down to is the lower the grade level, the easier it is for people to understand.
As far as the AddedBytes readability tool goes, you do have to take into consideration that more technical lingo will lead to a higher reading level. In one experiment, I pulled out any reference to WordPress Plugins and replaced it with “stuff for your blog.” Just replacing that took me from an 11.3 grade level down to 8.
The best way I’ve found to work around this so far is to simply replace any technical terms that can’t be simplified with something really simple and check your score with and without. If there’s not a whole lot of difference, then its probably time to revise your post. If there is a big difference after removing the technical terms, you’re ok. However, a quick definition of more esoteric technical terms never hurts (even if its just in parentheses). ACRONYMS also throw off your readability score.
Additionally, lists throw off your score as well because both of the readability-testing sites above look at your writing in the context of paragraphs. This is what it changed my list to: “I looked at these examples and their corresponding overall grades: The Authority Domains Blog – College Undergraduate Level Aaron Wall’s SEOBOOK Blog – Junior High Level Mashable – Genius Level Seth Godin’s Blog – Elementary School Level Scobleizer – Junior High Level.”
I went from almost 11 to between 8 and 9 just by removing the little list of blogs above. Again, if your score is high, just try removing the list and seeing what your score is after.
Lack of context is another factor to examine and think about when you’re working on your text’s readability as none of the tests mentioned above take context into consideration (e.g lists). Academic articles, super-technical websites for geeks and others of their ilk, while in my opinion can often be simplified, are meant for very select, targeted demographics and might not need greater readability.
For example, text on one of the most popular Linux sites (the one I linked to above) is pretty clear – if you know Linux. However, its readability level is postgrad, meaning the average person won’t understand it – unless they’re familar with Linux. And that’s ok, because the site is not targeted at the general public.
One more point – make sure you look at all the statistics below your average score. Keep the numbers within the parameters each statistic recommends and you should be just fine.
So what’s the score for this post? With the lists, I end up at a wide range, from 8-12, with my average at about 10.16.
When I take the lists away, I’m at between 7 and 11, with an average score of about 8.86.
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Wow, glad you found the tool useful! Just wanted to add that the code that runs the readability testing tool is open source and can be grabbed from (or contributed to) at:
http://code.google.com/p/php-text-statistics/
If you’re interested in this sort of thing, try testing readability formulas of your webpage(s) online.