Debunking the “Blog readability test”

You’ve likely seen this little application that’s making its way around the blogosphere: (Click here.)

You go to the website and it gives you a “readability” rating, ranging from “Elementary School” (or maybe there is even a preschool level) to “Junior High,” “High School,” “College,” “Graduate School,” all the way on up to “Genius.” You can enter any web address, and it will rate that site’s readability and give an image with a ranking to display on the site.

The first time I tried it, I was a little hurt that my blog was only at an elementary school reading level, but I decided that was fair since I mostly tell cute short stories about my kids and put up lots of pictures. However, I was then baffled by the “Genius” rating received by a blog I saw that didn’t have much content, nor much difference in style to mine. Experimenting more, I discovered that my blog’s rating changed from day to day (as I added content); at one point I think it even got up to a “College” rating.

All of this led me to do a little internet research. I didn’t find the source for how this particular test works, but I did find other readability measures that sound like they work similarly. There are various measures with different rules (you can find out more by doing your own searching — try keywords such as “reading level assessment,”) but from what I could tell, most seem to involve counting the syllables in words and the ratio of long words to short words, as well as measuring the length of sentences.

That seems fair enough in that presumably longer words are more difficult than short words, and long sentences more difficult than short ones. But the blog readability application seems to mislead people to assume that it rates the intelligence of the writer and the intelligence of the content, rather than the education level required of a reader to understand the content. And there is a difference; we’ve all read writing that contains lots of long words and sentences but, in the actual ideas expressed, amounts to gobbledygook*. Likewise, there are writers who use clear, simple sentences to make complex ideas easily understandable. So, really, a writer’s intelligence (which is what a lot of people are mistaking the readability test to measure) would be best assessed not so much by the reading level of their writing, but by whether they were able to attain the readability level they intended: can they write for an intended junior high school level audience, without the readability test telling them that the reader would have to be a genius to understand what they wrote? Or, if there’s a short word that expresses an idea perfectly, are they more intelligent to instead search for a longer word?

As you’ve probably guessed, it was my vanity that led me to do this research — and my vanity was assuaged by the outcome. I definitely tend to wordiness and long sentences, but I also like to be easily understood, so I habitually go back and chop my long sentences down into shorter ones, and sometimes also find shorter words that express the same ideas. I choose my style for my intended audience, and since my usual goal for my blog is easy approachability, I can now be happy with my blog’s “Elementary School” rating, without feeling like my college education was for naught.

(P.S. I guess I should say that I realize this doesn’t actually debunk the test — just points out the ways people sometimes misunderstand it, and some of the ways it can fail.)

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*Gobbledygook, by the way, would be a good word to experiment with — anybody want to fill a web page with one long sentence containing the word “gobbledygook” 2000 times, and see if it gets a genius rating?

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