Do You Read Me?

For many years now, I have been making an effort to write clearly. I’m far from perfect, but I do endeavour to make my writing easy to read. I like to use an array of words, but in manageable units that aren’t too taxing on the mind.

My sentences used to be tiresomely long. Paragraphs would follow the pattern of unsettled mind; a mind that entertained a myriad of thoughts simultaneously. I couldn’t get past the need to express my ability to connect everything; in one single sentence. School teachers would complain. I was told that my writing was convoluted. ‘Convoluted’ is a beautiful word. I had no idea what it meant. I’m not sure that they did either.

I went to a rural school. I learnt many ‘facts’ that I later discovered were false teachings. Some false teachings take years to expose. For instance, I was taught that ‘maybe’ must always be two words. Red pen on my exercise book always tore them apart. In 2008, the truth came out. ‘May’ and ‘be’ hate me. I denied them their right to be bedfellows for 28 years. MSEnglish is now my master.

In some ways, MSEnglish resembles my old teachers. It too hates long, convoluted sentences and, like a schoolmistress, it seems to take great pleasure in highlighting all mistakes in red. I am sure that it gets it wrong sometimes too.

Academic papers are needlessly complicated. They are so hard to read that – for the most part – only students and other academics read them. It’s not clever to write in a manner that no one understands; it’s ridiculously stupid.

After years of working in academia, and suffering from a case of ‘severe highfalutin overload’, I decided that I could never read an overcomplicated sentence again. My brain simply shut down at the thought of it.

On my journey towards a rejection of academia, I started to break every part of my writing down; shorter sentences, shorter paragraphs, and increased punctuation.

Now, it comes a little easier.

Here are my blog’s readability test scores:

Gunning Fog Index 8.74
The Gunning-Fog index is a rough measure of how many years of schooling it would take someone to understand the content. The lower the number, the more understandable the content is. So, if you started school at 4, by the age of 13 you’d be happy reading my blog.

Flesch Reading Ease 68.20
The result is an index number that rates the text on a 100-point scale. The higher the score, the easier it is to understand the document. Authors are encouraged to aim for a score of approximately 60 to 70. Perhaps I should become an author.

Flesch-Kincaid Grade 5.39
Like the Gunning-Fog index, it is a rough measure of how many years of schooling it would take someone to understand the content. On this scale, if you started school at 4, you’d be happy reading my blog by the age of 9 or 10.

If you want to test your website’s readability, you can test it here:
Test Your Website's Readability

Thanks to My Geek, I very recently (5 minutes ago) discovered this option in MSWord 2007:
Start, Word Options, Proofing, Show Readability Statistics, OK, F7 or Spell-check.

Enjoy!

Fabpants Recommends: Dan le Sac vs Scroobius Pip - Thou Shalt Always Kill (Knifehandchop Remix). Knifehandchop is brilliant. Check out Dan le Sac vs Scroobius Pip's album 'Angles' too. It's thoughtful, funny and includes a fantastic take on self harm and suicide in more than one track. Is this the middle class version of Skinnyman?