The “Blog Readability Test,” which claims to be able to determine “what level of education is necessary to understand your blog,” says that our Tech Liberation Front blog is just at the “High School” reading level.
I guess the engine behind this thing uses a Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test. That test judges “readability” by examining word length and sentence length. Longer words and sentences decrease “readability.”
I’ve always thought those Flesch-Kincaid tests were silly, but then I would think than since I am the king of the run-on sentence. My TLF blogging colleague Jim Harper is constantly getting on me about that fact since, by contrast, he is the master of brevity. Harper sometimes uses fewer words per sentence than Dr. Suess or EE Cummings.
But I now feel vindicated in some strange way, Jim, because all my run-on sentences may be the only thing keeping our score up at the “High School’ level! Dammit man, start using really big words–like honorificabilitudinitatibus and floccinaucinihilipilification–and make your sentences unnecessarily long like this one, which I am deliberately typing without end in order to shamelessly boost our Blog Readability Test score to the “Genius level” and save us the collective shame of being as easy to read as the Huffington Post!
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
