Readability

One of the things I love about the little corner of the blogosphere I'm in is the endless supply of interesting links from others blogs.

Like this one from T's blog. I have actually had to use readability tests as part of my work (which involves, among other things, reviewing textbooks) and would've loved to have had this site around to calculate the readability scores.

Here's the readability report for this blog:

Readability Grades

• Kincaid: 9.5ARI: 10.6
• Coleman-Liau: 10.3
• Flesch Index: 66.2
• Fog Index: 12.9
• Lix: 42.5 = school year 7
• SMOG-Grading: 11.2

Sentence info

• 14397 characters
• 3243 words, average length 4.44 characters = 1.40 syllables
• 146 sentences, average length 22.2 words
• 52% (76) short sentences (at most 17 words)
• 26% (38) long sentences (at least 32 words)
• 19 paragraphs, average length 7.7 sentences
• 3% (5) questions
• 45% (66) passive sentences
• longest sentence: 100 wds (at sentence 17)
• shortest sentence: 1 wd (at sentence 43)
  

Word usage

verb types:

• to be (94)
• auxiliary (24)

types as % of total:

• conjunctions 6(195)
• pronouns 10(315)
• prepositions 12(403)
• nominalizations 1(40)
  

Sentence beginnings

• pronoun (52)
• interrogative pronoun (4)
• article (9)
• subordinating conjunction (4)
• conjunction (6)
• preposition (5)

As with all statistics, the question is "What does all this mean?", so I'm going to mull over this and try and come to some conclusions on my style of writing. Am I starting too many sentences with pronouns? Are 7.7 sentences too many for a paragraph? Hmmm ...