Saturday, May 21, 2005

Readability Update

If you haven't noticed already, the link to the readability test page I put up some time ago is down now due to bandwidth issues, I've been crippled by the lack of it and my constant need to gauge my writing ever since. I finally found time to source the web for an alternative of that page and after about half an hour and a couple of queries, I finally found it. Here it is, another Readability Test. It's not as comprehensive as the other page but with what I'm about to write, it just might become better.

I'll work with an example, of this page of course(before this post was posted that is).
The results:
readability grades:
Kincaid: 4.6
ARI: 4.1
Coleman-Liau: 8.0
Flesch Index: 85.5
Fog Index: 7.5
Lix: 27.8 = below school year 5
SMOG-Grading: 7.8
sentence info:
56159 characters
13877 words, average length 4.05 characters = 1.28 syllables
1066 sentences, average length 13.0 words
45% (490) short sentences (at most 8 words)
15% (170) long sentences (at least 23 words)
96 paragraphs, average length 11.1 sentences
6% (74) questions
33% (360) passive sentences
longest sent 119 wds at sent 399; shortest sent 1 wds at sent 8
word usage:
verb types:
to be (474) auxiliary (246)
types as % of total:
conjunctions 5(633) pronouns 13(1845) prepositions 10(1403)
nominalizations 1(115)
sentence beginnings:
pronoun (310) interrogative pronoun (35) article (67)
subordinating conjunction (49) conjunction (17) preposition (38)


If you ask me, it pretty much blew me away. With reference to my previous post, "Ease of reading" is the same as "Flesch Index" while "Fog Index" is, well, "Fog Index". So you can conclude that this new test page provides results from more readability tests!
Comparing the results, the ease of reading this page increased without compromising the content, in fact, the Fog index upped by 0.01! Hah! In your face whoever! To make sure that the increase is not because of the different tests, I did the test on the new page with a few other sites I did it on before.

Results:

| Falls on Me |
Old:
Flesch Reading Ease: 77.28
Fog Index: 6.30

New:
Flesch Index: 86.2
Fog Index: 6.3

u're as bored as me...
Old:
Flesch Reading Ease: 85.34
Fog Index: 5.42

New:
Flesch Index: 81.2
Fog Index: 7.9

As you can see, |Falls on Me| also witnessed a rise in readability without any compromise in content. However, u're as bored as me... got a slight drop in readability with a significant increase in content, a good sign if you ask me.

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