So there's a site that will tell you the reading level of your blog (a brimming hornful of mead to Sieglinde for providing the link), and it looks as if traipsing through The Reverberate Hills means that you're reading at a Genius level, but we knew that all along, didn't we? That must explain why even the porn monkeys who stumble in here, and no doubt immediately exit in bewildered terror, are searching for fancy stuff like "dance of the seven veils porn" (take a bow, resident of Ljubljana, Slovenia!). I take no credit. I'm just sitting here doing what comes naturally, warbling my native woodnotes wild. It's my readers who deserve all the glory; obviously their astonishing physical beauty is not just a reflection of inner moral perfection, but also of superior yet modestly hidden intellect. Look, if I were that smart myself I'd have figured out how to do that link thing in the text. I did it once but haven't had any luck since then. I suppose this means I'll have to read some instructions. Damn! I hate that! In the meantime, I'll just spell out the reading level site: http://www.criticsrant.com/bb/reading_level.aspx
It's a bare-bones site; there are no witty summaries or snarky analysis. I suspect it's just a version of the readability levels we used to apply to school texts long ago and far away when I was sort of involved in that, and which were frequently pointed to by those who knew they existed as one of the causes of the endumbening of American discourse. This sounds urban legendish, but I was told that the lists had not been changed since their invention in the 1940s and so words like "astronaut" were considered obscure and collegial. And don't even think about slipping a subordinate clause in there, mister. So perhaps "Genius" level these days just means that in the late nineteenth century they'd have let you have a crack at the McGuffey Readers, once the wheat harvest was all safely stowed, of course, and the cows all milked and fed.
7 comments:
Oh, c'mon, this has got to be a scam. I put my "Civic Center" url into the thing and I got a "What level of education is your readership? Genius!" answer too.
I've been doing nothing but trying to simplify, essentialize and put a sweet surrounding with lots of pretty pictures on any bitter intelligence pills, but somehow I've been found out. This is dispiriting.
Hey Mike,
Well, it depends on what you mean by "scam." I don't think it always returns the "genius" answer, because Sieglinde is college/post-grad level, so let's speak slowly and explain the big words to her.
If, as I suspect, this is just the readability levels applied to school texts, then it's a different type of scam. My understanding is that specific words or grammatical structures (like anything that isn't a straightforward declarative sentence) triggers an increase in reading level. So it's possible that you used a few too many big words and that set off the alarms. These systems were applied loosely up until the 1980s, when computers allowed an instant and thorough read of an entire text and the generation of a very precise number. That's when they started being applied too rigorously and marketed with greater importance than they deserve.
Your pictures are still much prettier than the ones they use to distract people in school texts, though.
It took me a few days to get through all the hard words, but I managed.
I couldn't stand that there was so much mystery to this readability index, so I did some searching and found this site: http://juicystudio.com/services/readability.php#readresults
It gives a funny and interesting explanation of several different indices. Reading is such a complex, personal thing that I'm very skeptical of anything that can give a result at the speed of cyberspace. That being said, though, I think it got your blog right.
If I'm reading the criteria right, I get extra points just from writing the word "readability" due to its syllablosity.
I think you've hit the essential truthiness of the matter.
My blog for the Celebrity Series of Boston (ahem, cseries.typepad.com/celebrityseries/) garnered a College Undergrad rating on criticsrant. The Celebrity Series institutional web site, littered with challenging vocabulary like, "buy tickets" and "request a brochure" was cited by a web site grader as requiring a Phd to comprehend. Personally I find this stuff highly, um, uncorroborated! and, uh, unsubstantiated! Not to mention strangely addictive.
Hey Jack,
Maybe the Series site should switch to less challenging phrases, like "Stuff 4 U!" or . . . well, that's about it. For more addictive vocabulary fun, check out freerice.com, a site V told me about. It gives you words to define and as you get or guess them right it moves you up the scale to the well-nigh unattainable 50. I've gotten up to 49, thanks to guesswork and etymology. The site name comes from the rice they donate as you play, so you can feel virtuous while killing time at work, unlike those solitaire games we all used to play on office computers until the good Lord blessed us with the bounty of the Internet.
Patrick - your mailbox is full and the email bounced back.
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