Hatrack River Writers Workshop: How does your ms read?

This is topic How does your ms read? in forum Open Discussions About Writing at Hatrack River Writers Workshop.

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Posted by srhowen (Member # 462) on :

quote:
A good exercise is to highlight all the weak verbs in a page/chapter of your work. All the wases, ises, ams, weres, even the seems. Also, you can set Microsoft Word to check your percentage of passive sentences by going to Tools, Options, Grammar and Spelling, and check the show Readability Statistics (or something like that). I'm not sure what a decent percentage is, but you can monitor yourself over time to see if you improve your stats. Or you can copy excerpts of writers you admire and see how they did. (I just thought of that. I gotta try it. )

I do this with my writing but in WP. In WP hit the grammar check under tools then go to options and choose readability. You can compare to a number of documents.

I thought it might be fun to see what people come up with.

I did Hemingway first: (in Word Perfect)

Flesch-Kincaid grade level
Mine 5.2
Hemingway 4

Passive voice
Mine 2%
Hemingway 3%

Sentence Complexity (100=very complex)
Mine 24
Hemingway 14

Vocabulary Complexity (100=very complex)
Mine 8
Hemingway 5

Gettysburg Address:

Flesch-Kincaid grade level
Mine 5.2
Gettysburg Address 12.9

Passive voice
Mine 2%
Gettysburg Address 9%

Sentence Complexity (100=very complex)
Mine 24
Gettysburg Address 75

Vocabulary Complexity (100=very complex)
Mine 8
Gettysburg Address 15

1040EZ Tax instructions:

Flesch-Kincaid grade level
Mine 5.2
1040EZ Tax instructions 10.5

Passive voice
Mine 2%
1040EZ Tax instructions 24%

Sentence Complexity (100=very complex)
Mine 24
1040EZ Tax instructions 27

Vocabulary Complexity (100=very complex)
Mine 8
1040EZ Tax instructions 42

Interesting--so what do you come up with?

Shawn

Posted by srhowen (Member # 462) on :

In Word, I got a 4.4 grade level and 1% passive voice.

Shawn

Posted by Jules (Member # 1658) on :

Does anyone know what the Flesch-Kincaid level actually measures? Its something I've wondered about for a while...

Posted by Balthasar (Member # 5399) on :

It would be good to remember that different kinds of writing (fiction, political addresses, tax instructions) are going to yeild different results.

That said, the best thing this exercise can do is to show you how your sentence structure, grammar, vocabulary compare to other fiction writers.

Someone should try comparing Hemingway to Faulkner!!

Posted by Kolona (Member # 1438) on :

Hemmingway. Hmmmph. I'm not surprised. I can't stand his writing. But he was a good choice as a polar opposite to the Gettysburg Address.

The high passivity rate for tax instructions is accurate, because the doer (the taxpayer) is not important in this case. It's the doing (the instructions) that is the issue. That may sound cynical, but for the purposes of the active/passive discussion it's absolutely on mark. It's a proper use of passive voice.

With Flesch Reading Scores, according to Word, "The higher the score, the easier to understand the document." Word suggests aiming for a score of 60-70. It advises a grade level of 7-8. All it measures, though, are the average number of syllables per word and the average number of words per sentence. It doesn't evaluate content. If you put gobbledy-gook into a document you could score high or low depending on the configuration of the gobbledy-gook.

Out of curiosity, I ran four of Infyrno's postings and he averaged 5% passivity (though he had a 16%, 4%, and two 0%s; as a non-statistician, I'm not sure how to look at that since there are such extremes. Maybe drop high and low and end up with 2%?), 74.2 Flesch Ease Score, and 6.9 grade level. My novel presently runs 2.1 passivity, 71.0 Flesch Ease Score, and 6.7 grade level.

Balthasar is right. Any document with a lot of dialogue, for instance, would score differently than one with a lot of narrative.

These are not infallible tools, though they have their uses.

Posted by Lord Darkstorm (Member # 1610) on :

I decided to try it. Here is what I got
Hemingway
Grade Level
Mine: 5.26
Hemingway: 4

Passive voice
Mine: 4
Hemingway: 3

Sentence Complexity
Mine: 24
Hemingway: 14

Vocabulary complexity
mine: 7
Hemingway: 5

So, does this mean I need to work on the passive voice some more?

Posted by Kolona (Member # 1438) on :

I think you're safe as long as you stay away from the 24% of the IRS.

(Although we can all use some work on passive voice -- or at least be on our guard to keep it in check.)

Posted by glogpro (Member # 1745) on :

People! Don't pay any attention to that mechanized writing evaluation crap. As already observed, it is completely blind to meaning. And if people rely on it, think of the mischief it will do to writing and literacy! (ok --forget about literacy, the existence of which is already a highly dubious supposition). Many years ago, when these superficial indices of readability were first introduced, school textbook publishers adopted them as a marketing tool. Soon, no text could be adopted unless its readablity profile met some arbitrary and meaningless standard. Today the result is nearly contentless textbooks, at least in math (which are the ones I bother to look at). Or take another example -- computerized trading. In the 1980's, analysts started building real time programs that would monitor the market and under preset conditions, automatically issue buy or sell warnings to the brokers. Unfortunately, these programs were all very similar. So, when enough of the big brokerages and mutual fund managers were using them, and when the market hit the right set of conditions, whamo, it was the stock market equivalent of the tacoma narrows bridge collapse, aka the biggest stock market crash of the post war era. So please -- don't use the stupid WP readability analyzer.

But now that I come to think about it, this would be a great plot for a story. Get enough of these moronic expert system type software controls in use at the same time, spread through all aspects of a society, and you could get an impressive general collapse.
What fun!

Posted by srhowen (Member # 462) on :

Hmm--well you know it was for "fun" just to see what it came up with.

Shawn

Posted by Kolona (Member # 1438) on :

For percentage of passive verb constructions

it has some use. The readability stuff misses the mark.

Posted by Nexus Capacitor (Member # 1694) on :

Glogpro, are you suggesting that if enough people look at the WP Readability Analyzer there will be a writing crash? Do you believe that by merely looking at a statistical indicator, writers will lose their ability to write en masse?

That's either a sign of mental illness or brilliant creativity! Out of respect, I'll assert that it's the latter.

Passive Sentences: 0%
Flesch Reading Ease: 51.3
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 9.1