Readability Data
Via Kevin Drum, it seems that you can now feed a URL into Readability Tester. If anyone has used Microsoft Word, you can see your Flesch Reading Ease or Flesch-Kincaid grade level everytime you spell-check. Well, because I like doing this sort of thing, I ran each Monthly Archive Page through the parser, which resulted in this graph:
You can see the same graph as a cool xml-powered graph. A little explanation is in store: the x-axis is time (in months), the y-axis is the score, the orange line represents the Gunning Fog Index and the green line represents Flesch-Kincaid Grade level of the writing. In both cases a higher score is better.
As you can see, there were some months where I was so lazy I didn't even post once per month. At the highest peak I'm writing at an 8th grade level or about the level of Wall Street Journal - which I don't really know how that works out, but there you go.
As you can see when I first started out (right side) my writing was not so hot - about a 3rd grade level. In the beginning I wrote shorter posts which were not so pithy. I think what is dragging the overall scores down is all of the extraneous junk which accompanies each blog post (comment & trackback anchors and dates). I have always said that my writing has improved the longer this website has been up - but this was based on anecdotal evidence. Now I have some sort of baseline to measure this.
I plan on updating this graph monthly, so check back.
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This is the permanent home of Readability Data. I wrote this post at 11:10 on April 21, 2005. This post is part of grubbykid.com, a weblog. If you liked this entry, why don't you read some other posts such as Papal Leaks or Research, Much?? Or you could go to the site archives or return home. All are good choices.
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Some descriptive tags for this entry are: data meta graph writing skill.
Mommy... what's a tag?
Some descriptive tags for this entry are: data, graph, meta, skill, writing.
Mommy... what's a tag?
