Posted on by David

Readability quotients

This link at Boudicca’s Voice leads to a site that calculates readability quotients for just about any html document… including your blog, if you want
 
Here are two sites compared.  Well, one’s a site and the other’s a representative sample of an author’s work. Now, which is Shakespeare’s and which is mine?
 
(Jeopardy music plays in background—ok, imagine it is.) 
 
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If you thought the “more difficult read” was Shakespeare, go to the back of the class.  The Shakespearean sonnet I selected (semi-random, just clicked on first one my mouse rode over) was this one:
 
SONNET 6 
Then let not winter’s ragged hand deface 
In thee thy summer, ere thou be distill’d: 
Make sweet some vial; treasure thou some place 
With beauty’s treasure, ere it be self-kill’d. 
That use is not forbidden usury, 
Which happies those that pay the willing loan; 
That’s for thyself to breed another thee, 
Or ten times happier, be it ten for one; 
Ten times thyself were happier than thou art, 
If ten of thine ten times refigured thee: 
Then what could death do, if thou shouldst depart, 
Leaving thee living in posterity? 
Be not self-will’d, for thou art much too fair 
To be death’s conquest and make worms thine heir.
 
It’s almost a rule: great writing is easy to read. Suckitudinous writing is most often the opposite.
 
NOTE: I am not asserting that because my blog features generally short sentences and easy vocabulary that it’s great writing. Accessibility is just the entry level for writing that’s worth reading.
 
UPDATE: If I don’t have my sidebar fixed by now, locate it at the bottom of the page.  And if you want to show me where I’ve fragged my template, fee free.  🙂

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