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.
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Does anyone know what the Flesch-Kincaid level actually measures? Its something I've wondered about for a while... Posts: 626 | Registered: Jun 2003
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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!!
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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.
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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!
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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.
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it has some use. The readability stuff misses the mark.
