Comments on: The Booker Prize: Those Readability Stats in Full

By: The Serial Comma » The Great Gatsby in Pieces

The Serial Comma » The Great Gatsby in Pieces — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 21:17:27 +0000

[...] recent exchange at The Reader Online reminded me of Word’s auto-summarize feature. Having nothing better to do, I ran The Great [...]

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 20:52:17 +0000

Humbling indeed. I think you’ve just solved the Bodleian Library’s storage problem.

By: Rob

Rob — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 20:36:58 +0000

I’m always drawn to Word’s auto-summarize feature. If you run it enough times, you can turn an entire novel into ten lines of free verse. It’s … humbling.

By: Chris Routledge

Chris Routledge — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 17:33:15 +0000

Why thank you Janice. I am blushing now. I remember doing this experiment as a graduate student in the mid-1990s, typing in text from well-known detective fiction writers. I recall being amazed at how they managed to hit the reading age of their target audience without any kind of technological help. So Jones is either writing like that because that’s how he writes, or he is deliberately aiming his work at a notional dumbed-down audience.

By: Janice Harayda

Janice Harayda — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 17:00:22 +0000

Thanks for the link, Chris. Just ran the stats for your introduction to my post and found that you’re writing at a Flesch-Kincaid grade level of 12.0, the highest. (The Flesch-Kincaid rankings stop with grade 12, the final grade in American high schools, somewhat comparable to Sixth Form.)

You’re writing at a higher level than James Boswell in a page from his “Life of Johnson” that I tested last fall (grade 8.6) and at the same level as Kazuo ishiguro in his Booker winner, “The Remains of the Day” (grade 12.0). You’re also writing at the level of Nora Ephron in “I Feel Bad About My Neck” (12.0), one of the major bestsellers of the year in the U.S. and proof that you don’t have to write at Mitch Albom’s level to make it onto the lists here. You owe your writing teachers a lovely thank-you note.