17 December 2010

How Readable Is This Blog?

Google has a feature that can rate a blog based on reading level. What is the reading level of the posts is this blog?

Apparently: 44% Basic, 50% Intermediate and 4% Advanced (rounding errors or in inability to classify posts left us 2 percentage points short of 100%).

Some of the "advanced reading level" posts concern physics, epidemiology, linguistics and law.

The intermediate reading level posts seem to concern mostly politics, economics, law and military affairs.

The basic reading level posts have a heavy dose of technology blogging and politics.

By comparison, Colorado Pols is 19% Basic, 80% Intermediate and less than 1% Advanced, something that intuitively doesn't seem right, although it does mirror somewhat the mix of posts I make on the subject of politics.

There is more to the algorhythm than subject matter, however, as blogs about the same general subject can have very different readability levels.

2 comments:

Maju said...

I've seen this stuff mentioned elsewhere and I have the impression that the scale is meaningless, right?

Andrew Oh-Willeke said...

I've only encountered it a few times, and I don't know what to make of it. The readability scale in my word processing program is rather accurate, but Google's tool seems less so.