Terry of I See Invisible People and Sherry Chandler both ran their blogs through this Blog Readability Test, so of course I had to try it too. While Terry and Sherry both score as plainspoken women, (grammar school and high school, respectively) I got this "Genius" classification, which means I'm the kind of gal who calls a spade a geotome.
The simplest assessments of reading level just calculate your average number of letters per word--the higher the number of letters per word, the higher the reading level. I think this is what's going on here. My recent infatuation with the "Bond Antepenultimate Knitting Machine" is responsible for a lot of letters. I know I should knock it off, it wasn't that funny the first time, but ever since I learned the word "antepenultimate" in my ninth grade Latin class, I've been waiting to use it, and I don't expect I'll have another chance.
I also ran my Web site's index page, My Spice Ridge Home, through the program, and it gave a rating of "College: Post-Grad." My index page is free of "antepenultimates" and has very little text--it's mostly lists of links, but nearly every line contains "Pocahontas County," a letter-intensive phrase.
After working with kids and with adult basic education learners, I've become really interested in reading levels and accessibility on Web pages. I happened to have these "Readability" links tucked away, just waiting for an excuse to be posted.
5 comments:
I do not recall the grade level of first encounter, but I've liked penultimate for a long time. I was excited to see the knitting macnine described as antepenultimate in the blog November 1, 2007.
Now, I have a new word, having spent twenty minutes using ixquick.com and Google as geotomys.
I'm a word geek, but I must confess I've never encountered "antepenultimate". What a specialized and obscure word!
I tried the readability link but it wasn't able to read my blog, for some reason.
are you familiar with the 'worthles word for the day" site? a lovely collection of obsure, limited use words..
(and of course there is AWAD (a word a day server.. a new word mailed to you (and never any spam, and almost no ads (very small text only!)
Awad can be found easily by googling.. here is link to wwftd
http://home.comcast.net/~wwftd/
Larry, there are much better reading level assessment calculators out there--search for "reading level" because "readability" mostly turns up evaluations of different fonts.
A geotome comes in handy, doesn't it? I had to stop visiting the word-play web sites. I was starting to annoy my friends and family. You see what happened with "antepenultimate..."
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