Proponents of various measures of readability may argue that some of these works should have slightly different relative rankings. This average generally is higher than the Flesch-Kincaid index itself. For the above chart, I ran everything through the five most popular calculators, and took an average. Flesch-Kincaid is the most popular calculator, but some scholars argue that other indices, like Gunning-Fog and SMOG (Stands for Simple Measure of Gobbledygook. What this shows is the approximate number of years of education one needs to be able to comprehend the text. Rowling) did seem to get more complex over time in the samples I ran.įor reference, I threw in a few other things: an academic paper about reading level indices, another paper about chess expertise, a Seth Godin blog post, the text of the Affordable Care Act, and the children’s book Goodnight Moon. For the most part, authors got similar scores across their books however, a few (e.g., Tom Clancy, J.K. I did run samples of a few authors’ different works in just for fun. It’s not perfectly scientific, since I didn’t run each author’s entire body of work through the machine. I grabbed each author’s most well-known work, pasting in enough text to gain a statistical confidence. I also ran some popular crime and romance novelists, a few political books I despise, and a couple of business writers who bought their way onto bestseller lists (i.e., their work wasn’t notable enough to sell on its own). Upon learning this, I did the only thing a self-respecting geek could do at that point: I ran every bestselling writer I had on my Kindle through the machine. That’s when I was really surprised:Īpparently, my man Ernest, the Pulitzer- and Nobel Prize-winning novelist whose work shaped 20th-century fiction, wrote for elementary schoolers. So I ran a reading level calculation on The Old Man and the Sea. I learned, to my dismay, that I’ve been writing for eighth graders.Ĭuriosity piqued, I decided to see how I compared to the first famous writer that popped in my head: Ernest Hemingway. After the chat, just for fun, I ran a chapter from my book through the most common one, the Flesch-Kincaid index: ![]() ![]() Scholars have formulas for automatically estimating reading level using syllables, sentence length, and other proxies for vocabulary and concept complexity. The other day, a friend and I were talking about becoming better writers by doing a “reading level analysis” of our work.
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