Via Prof. Bainbridge (Apr. 22) comes word of an automatic checker that will rate the readability of a website, assigning it scores according to its “fog index”, its reading ease, and the educational level it demands of readers. When we run the current front page of Overlawyered.com through the checker it tells us, among other things, that our average sentence contains 8.24 words, of which 15.48% are of three syllables or more. (The first number seems low; maybe the checker is using a nonstandard definition of “sentence”.) At any rate, our “fog index” stands at 9.49 on a scale on which Time and Newsweek stand at 10 (that is, slightly harder to read than us) and most popular novels score between 8 and 10. On the alternative “Flesch reading ease” measure, on which “Authors are encouraged to aim for a score of approximately 60 to 70,” we come in at 65.29. Finally, on the “Flesch-Kincaid grade level” calculation, we score a 6.20, suggesting that a seventh grader might be capable of following along with the posts here, though we can’t recall hearing from any who do. As a check, we ran the March 2005 archives through and got a slightly more difficult rating: 10.74 fog (comparable to the WSJ), 60.25 reading ease, and a grade level of 7.58. Overall, we come off as easier to read than Prof. Bainbridge himself or the Volokh Conspiracy, but not so easy to read as Glenn Reynolds — no great surprise on either front.
Easy to read, that’s us
Via Prof. Bainbridge (Apr. 22) comes word of an automatic checker that will rate the readability of a website, assigning it scores according to its “fog index”, its reading ease, and the educational level it demands of readers. When we run the current front page of Overlawyered.com through the checker it tells us, among other […]
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Can You Read Me Now?
If you find your favorite blogs sometimes difficult to decipher, consider this: With the same amount of work, the authors could produce half as much information that was twice as readable.