What's the readability of your WIP?

just checked my stats and they're quite similar to your own.

Not sure it means anything of significance. I certainly wouldn't worry about it.

Big words count for little. Big ideas matter a lot more.

8th grade level.

Here's the one that is almost finished:

Readability Selection Document
Average sentences per paragraph: - 5.52
Average words per sentence: - 12.29
Average characters per word: - 4.39
Average words per page: - 1395.71
Flesch Reading Ease: [?] - 80.36
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: [?] - 5.00
Automated Readability Index: [?] - 5.00

And here's the one I'd like to get published:

Average sentences per paragraph: - 4.66
Average words per sentence: - 10.53
Average characters per word: - 4.55
Average words per page: - 1014.83
Flesch Reading Ease: [?] - 78.95
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: [?] - 5.00
Automated Readability Index: [?] - 5.00

I looked up the definition of these things once, and I wasn't terribly impressed. It's basically the number of long words you use. Sentence length counts also, but much more emphasis is placed on word length than on sentence length. Here's more info, and the formulas:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch-Kincaid_Readability_Test

Since very long words tend to occur more in technical books than in general fiction, it's not surprising that general fiction scores pretty low.

Let's all strive to be at the very peak of the bell curve.

sleepsheep said:

Now, I was quite surprised, since I'm writing adult fiction. I wonder if this is a bad thing, or a good thing, or doesn't matter at all. Do your readability ratings correspond to the age demographic that your WIP is targeting?

Click to expand...

Adult novel doesn't mean it takes a PhD to read your book. Readability has more to do with vocabulary, sentence structures, etc. and nothing to do with concepts, ideas, and content.

Fiction tends to have higher readability than nonfiction or newspapers/magazines articles.

Also, the more dialogue your manuscript has, the higher the readability score. Don't ask me why.

I always strive to be readable, much like Hemingway or Mark Twain, who wrote at 8-10th grade readability. I tend to write shorter sentences than long, and I tend to use simpler words.


Here's mine for a partial of my WIP which is heavy on dialogue (and yes, it's adult fiction):


Average sentences per paragraph: - 3.31
Average words per sentence: - 5.46
Average characters per word: - 4.45
Average words per page: - 695.10
Flesch Reading Ease: - 89.34
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: - 2.00
Automated Readability Index: - 2.00

I think I've found a flaw.

Comes out as third grade - whatever that is in the good old US.

But out of 57,000 words, almost fifteen hundred are variations on the 'fuck'. Not to mention all the other 'colourful' ones.

Mmm . . .

Reading level assessments take a number of things into account, including sentence length and structure. How prevalent is your use of commas? Do you use parentheticals? Is your sentence structure dominantly simple or complex? What's the prevalence of multi-syllable words? How often are words repeated?

Reading level "scores" gauge all of the above and generate an average based on whatever information rests in their base of referential data. The "assessment" does not comprehend the words, just assess them. Most novels do not contain a lot of complex sentences or parentheticals. A lot of words repeat: I said, he said, looked, wanted, eggplant, etc. Novels are not PhD dissertations or academic reports. Those will score much higher on any reading level assessment.

While MG and YA books will likely contain more simple sentence construction and fewer multi-syllabic words, the primary difference between YA and adult novels (someone correct me if I'm wrong; I'm not a big YA reader) is the content and its suitability for the target audience.

It can be an interesting exercise to see where your novel "scores" on a reading level scale, but don't take the results to be any kind of accurate reflection of who your audience may be or how easy or "advanced" your writing. The scores can serve as a guide, primarily to teachers, but I've seen middle school books score at the high school level while still being well-received and used in the middle school nonfiction market. A number of factors came into play in those instances, including subject matter. Run through the same reading assessment test, a book about science will score much higher than a book about my pet dog.

First 2 chaps of Paramount:

Average sentences per paragraph: - 4.25
Average words per sentence: - 13.34
Average characters per word: - 4.44
Average words per page: - 1120.75
Flesch Reading Ease: [?] - 78.88
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: [?] - 6.00
Automated Readability Index: [?] - 6.00

This work is aimed for adults so I guess it's okay?

Don't worry - maestrowork is quite right with this:

maestrowork said:

Adult novel doesn't mean it takes a PhD to read your book. Readability has more to do with vocabulary, sentence structures, etc. and nothing to do with concepts, ideas, and content.

Fiction tends to have higher readability than nonfiction or newspapers/magazines articles.

Also, the more dialogue your manuscript has, the higher the readability score. Don't ask me why.

I always strive to be readable, much like Hemingway or Mark Twain, who wrote at 8-10th grade readability. I tend to write shorter sentences than long, and I tend to use simpler words.

Click to expand...

As an experiment I tried plugging some of my academic essays into the same Google Docs function.

My timed essays came out in the low 30s. Note that these were timed essays. The score for my thesis (too large a file to upload into Google Docs) would probably be significantly lower. Considering that it was of a high enough quality to get a Cambridge Masters I suspect my language skills are fine.

However my WIP came out even higher than yours.

I looked this up a while back when I ran it through and learned I was supposedly writing at a 7th grade level. For fiction, characters for word tends to come out between 4 and 5. FWIW, the scientific writing I do for my job tends to come out at 13th grade level and higher. Longer words & sentences, etc.

A Flesch-Kincaid Grade level in the 5-8 range doesn't mean that the computer thinks you're writing a middle-grade novel It's just how the formula works.

I just did this exercise with a scientific paper I just had published with one of the best international scientific journals. The paper is a combination of electrophysiology, immunohistochemistry, and morphology, and it has the usual scientific jargon. I entered a single-spaced final WORD version of the paper, not the journal's pdf version (hence 17 pages in the evaluation and 11 pages in the journal reference). Here's the reference:

Control of swimming in the hydrozoan jellyfish Aequorea victoria: subumbrellar organization and local inhibition. Journal of Experimental Biology 211: 3467-3477 (2008).

Here is a part of the file (the abstract of the paper):

The subumbrella of the hydrozoan jellyfish Aequorea victoria is divided by numerous radial canals and attached gonads, so the subumbrellar musculature is partitioned into subumbrellar segments. The ectoderm of each segment includes two types of muscle; smooth muscle with a radial orientation, used for local (feeding and righting) and widespread (protective) radial responses, and striated muscle with a circular orientation which produces swim contractions. Two subumbrellar nerve nets were found, one of which stained with a commercial antibody produced against the bioactive peptide FMRFamide. Circular muscle cells produce a single, long-duration action potential with each swim, triggered by a single junctional potential. In addition, the circular cells are electrically coupled so full contractions require both electrotonic depolarization from adjacent cells and synaptic input from a subumbrellar nerve net. The radial cells, which form a layer superficial to the circular cells, are also activated by a subumbrellar nerve net, and produce short-duration action potentials. The radial muscle cells are electrically coupled to one another. No coupling exists between the two muscle layers. Spread of excitation between adjacent segments is decremental, and nerve net-activated junctional potentials disappear during local inhibition of swimming (such as with a radial response). Variable swim contractions are controlled by a combination of synaptic input from the motor network of the inner nerve ring, synaptic input from a subumbrellar nerve net, and electrotonic depolarization from adjacent, active muscle cells.

And here is the statistical evaluation of the entire document:

CountsSelectionDocument
Words: - 10501
Characters (no spaces): - 57951
Characters (with spaces): - 68308
Paragraphs: - 339
Sentences: - 1140
Pages (approximate): - 17
ReadabilitySelectionDocument
Average sentences per paragraph: - 3.36
Average words per sentence: - 9.21
Average characters per word: - 5.52
Average words per page: - 617.71
Flesch Reading Ease: - 47.35
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: - 9.00
Automated Readability Index: - 9.00



Does this tell y'all anything about the realistic value of this particular evaluative program (aside from the reading ease thing)?

* eyes glazing over Fizzy's abstract *

I just used one of my movie reviews as a test. It's not rocket science. It's just a movie review, but it comes out "harder" as the fiction:


Readability Selection Document
Average sentences per paragraph: - 2.22
Average words per sentence: - 11.70
Average characters per word: - 4.86
Average words per page: - 479.50
Flesch Reading Ease: - 60.79
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: - 8.00
Automated Readability Index: - 7.00

I've noticed that any essay type things I did for school tended to come out at a way higher grade level than stories. Dialogue seems to make it go down pretty quickly. (You can--or could, I have no clue if you still can in word 2007--do that same thing with word).

There's only so much it can figure out without taking things into account factors beyond just the words and mechanics.

kaitlin008 said:

Dialogue seems to make it go down pretty quickly.

Click to expand...

Just for comparison, I rescanned the first example upthread but cut out all the dialogue, leaving only the narrative:

Average sentences per paragraph: - 5.35
Average words per sentence: - 10.15
Average characters per word: - 4.50
Average words per page: - 940.67
Flesch Reading Ease: [?] - 80.39
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: [?] - 5.00
Automated Readability Index: [?] - 5.00


this is the original score with dialogue:

Average sentences per paragraph: - 3.31
Average words per sentence: - 5.46
Average characters per word: - 4.45
Average words per page: - 695.10
Flesch Reading Ease: - 89.34
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: - 2.00
Automated Readability Index: - 2.00

Click to expand...

Middle chaps from 4th MS...

Average sentences per paragraph: 2.88
Average words per sentence: 9.16
Average characters per word: 4.61
Average words per page: 820.92
Flesch Reading Ease: 77.66
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 5.00
Automated Readability Index: 5.00

Middle chaps from 5th ms...

Average sentences per paragraph: 3.66
Average words per sentence: 10.38
Average characters per word: 4.61
Average words per page: 1036.64
Flesch Reading Ease: 78.25
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 5.00
Automated Readability Index: 5.00

Hmm, interesting little thing, but Neurofizz's example there pretty much kills the veracity of these numbers for me. Damn, this was pretty cool at first.

Am I the only one who found the jellyfish excerpt interesting? A bit obtuse, sure, but only because I'm not very familiar with jellyfish.

Anyway. I took the May SF/F challenge piece I did in SYW and plugged in a slightly more recent version to Google Docs just for the heck of it. Here's the results:

Words: - 1092
Characters (no spaces): - 4848
Characters (with spaces): - 5933
Paragraphs: - 29
Sentences: - 117
Pages (approximate): - 2

Average sentences per paragraph: - 4.03
Average words per sentence: - 9.33
Average characters per word: - 4.44
Average words per page: - 546.00
Flesch Reading Ease: - 83.48
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: - 4.00
Automated Readability Index: - 4.00


I'm calling shenanigans.

So... to figure this out I have to go and sign up with evil Google docs?

No, there are numerous web-based tools that will provide the scores for you also. Here's one of many.

WordPerfect has the reading score built in.

But you know something? It's meaningless.

Shadow_Ferret said:

So... to figure this out I have to go and sign up with evil Google docs?

Click to expand...

Word also has it built in.

maestrowork said:

Just for comparison, I rescanned the first example upthread but cut out all the dialogue, leaving only the narrative:

Click to expand...

I tried the same with one of my short stories. With the dialogue I got an Automated Readability Index of 5, and without dialogue I got 11.

Looking at the wikipedias for the various scores, it looks like sentence and word lengths are the only things that matter. Dialogue tends to be composed of short words and short sentences, so it brings the 'readability' up a lot. In my story, removing dialogue pushed the words per sentence from 10 to 22, and apparently that alone doubled the ARI score. Makes me skeptical how well such things work for fiction, because stories with short and simple dialogue and impenetrable narratives (anything by Cormac McCarthy, for example) are far more difficult to read than such a formula would suggest.


And it seems like a strange metric in general, since it doesn't measure the obscurity of words, the complexity of a sentence, or the comprehensibility of its ideas--that is, it doesn't seem to measure any of the things that actually affect readability. (That last sentence had an Automated Readability Index of 23, so I hope you're all post-doctorates).

Still fun to play around with though.

The indices place far more weight on word length than they do on sentence length, and of course they don't consider that some words are much harder than others. I think it's mainly meant to evaluate children's literature.