ExposureBlog

In an earlier post I mentioned *readibility* and noted that Hemingway wrote at the fifth grade reading level.  That wasn’t just the opinion of some bored consultant.  Hemingway honestly wrote at the fifth grade reading level.  It’s been quantitatively verified (which means you can take that statement to the bank.)  Okay. So how do we know that? you might ask. 

“Readibility score” I reply. 

And while there are some great sites out there that will explain readability scores, here’s the history:

The year 1992 was an innocent time. A B&W Mac cost several thousand bucks, nobody used the Apple /// anymore, DOS was getting smarter and smarter, and all the cool writers on the planet used something called WordPerfect 5.1. 

That was when Grammatik 5 was released by a company called Reference Software International, based in San Francisco. It cost a hundred bucks (serious money in those days) and installed, took up about a megabyte of space.  Good thing it wasn’t bigger, given that most hard drives at the time, stored only 40 megabytes soaking wet.

Anyway, GK5 would scan your WP 5.1 file and tell you the readability score, or more accurately, the *Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level*.  As a bonus it also reported the Flesch Reading Ease score AND the Gunning’s Fog Index–which, according to the manual (page 101) was a “measure of the approximate grade level a reader must have achieved to understand the document.”

For writers, the idea was: the lower the score, the more people will understand it.

The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score was calculated using the following formula:

0.39 x (average number of words per sentence) + 11.8 x (average number of syllables per word). Total - 15.59 = Grade Level.

The *Flesch Reading Ease* score was just as complicated:

1.015 x (average number of words per sentence) + 0.846 x (number of syllables per 100 words); then, 206.835 - Total = Flesch Reading Ease Score.. . Where:

90-100 = Very Easy (4th Grade)

80-90 = Easy (5th Grade)

70-80 = Fairly Easy (6th Grade)

60-70 = Standard (7th-8th Grade)

50-60 = Fairly Difficult (Some High School)

30-50 = Difficult (High School-College)

0-30 = Very Difficult (College Level and up)

Lastly, there was the appropriately-named *Gunning’s Fog Index*.

The formula: (Average number of words per sentence) + (number of words of 3 syllables or more). ; Total x 0.4 = Fog Index.

Unfortunately, the Grammatik 5.0 manual didn’t include a Fog Index range, so the user really wasn’t able to properly determine what the scores meant.  It was a serious flaw.  

But we all make mistakes. 

Moving on: The WordPerfect Corporation, back when it really was the WordPerfect Corporation and not Novell or Corel or Microsoft or Sams Club, bought Grammatik and incorporated it into Wordperfect 6.x. Unfortunately, WP 6.x was that legendary hybrid software that was so complicated no one could use it: the program included a toggle between DOS and Windows, and was seriously slow—even on those 33 MHz towers that included the big red (occasionally, yellow) turbo button. Press that button and a yellow LED would flash and the machine would become a veritible computational rocket.  (Side query: Back in those days did anyone ever NOT use their computer in turbo mode?)

Naturally, Microsoft then incorporated a feature in it’s Microsoft Word program that did essentially the same thing as the WordPerfect-subsumed Grammatik 5.0. Now, all anyone had to do was to request the document in Microsoft Word and then check it using the readability function—a procedure which I recommend for anyone who receives a report from a consultant.

And here’s why:

Report readability is important in most cases, and in some cases it is the most important thing.   Because if the consultant can’t explain his position on paper so an eighth grader can understand it, it’s doubtful that the jury will be able to figure it out when he has to explain it on the witness stand.