Readability

My friend H.H.R. Gorman posted an entry to her blog, ‘5 Tests You Should Put Your Story (or Characters) Through,’ that has knocked the writing socks off my feet, especially when it comes to the readability. Much of my work it seems, is hard to read and comes out at the eleventh and twelfth grade level.

To be honest, I’ve never thought about reading levels, much less the difficulty in reading what I’ve written. For me it has always been to start with a premise and continue from there.

Of the ten stories I submitted to the aggregator she provided in her posting, only one was in the seventh grade level. And I’m certain that I should be writing further below that, should I want to create any sort of popularity for myself online.

Flesch Reading Ease score: 77.4, fairly easy to read
Gunning Fog: 5.9, fairly easy to read
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 4.9, fifth grade
The Coleman-Liau Index: 6, sixth grade
The SMOG Index: 5.4, fifth grade
Automated Readability Index: 2.9, grade level: 8-9 yrs. old
Linsear Write Formula: 4.7, fifth Grade

And don’t even let me get started on the Bechdel, Mako Mori, Mary Sue/Gary Stu, and the Coldsteel the Hedgeheg tests. In fact, I think I heard my computer’s hard drive laughing at me for even considering these.

Of course, the included scores verses the second sentence of this post, makes me into a liar. HA!

As I wrote H. — I have some work to do…