Brainster's Blog: Now With 50% Less Fog
I was looking for a change of pace today, so I thought I'd look up how readable Brainster's is. I found
this website where you just enter the URL of your blog and it rates it in terms of readability.
Brainster's came out pretty well on the readability issue. I came out at 8.4 on the Kincaid scale, 9.1 on the ARI, 10.5 on the Coleman-Liau, 68.4 on the Flesch index and 11.6 on the Fog Index. My SMOG grade was 10.6. Explanations of all these measurements are
here.
Then I checked a couple other blogs. For example, the
Belmont Club, which is a great blog but not exactly easy reading came out as expected, as much less readable. Their scores were 11.2, 12.8, 13.2, 53.7 (high numbers are more readable on the Flesch Index), 14.6 and 12.8.
Kitty, whose blog has always seemed very readable to me, had very similar scores to Brainster, although in most cases her blog graded out as just a tad more readable than mine. In fact, of the 16 or so blogs I put through the scoring, hers was judged the most readable by both the Coleman Liau formula and the Flesch index. The toughest blogs to read, according to these formulas were the aforementioned
Belmont Club and
Power Line.
The most comparable blog to Brainster's in terms of readability was
Something to Cry About. The second most comparable was the blogfather himself,
Instapundit.
Kitty's was the third most comparable, but really all three of these blogs were very, very comparable, with over a 99.9% correlation between our scores.
Lefty blogger
Atrios was fairly comparable to my blog in readability, with a 99.8% correlation in readability scores, but
Matt Yglesias (99.0%) and
Oliver Willis (98.6%) were less comparable. Brainster's was quite comparable to
Michelle Malkin (99.8%) but oddly not to
Hugh Hewitt (97.9%).
Crush Kerry was very comparable (99.9%),
Ankle-Biting Pundits a little less so (99.3%).
Note that while readability is a good thing, having substantially different scores from mine is not necessarily awful. Writing about tougher or more technical subjects will almost inevitably detract from your readability scores, but it does not necessarily mean your blog is less readable in reality. For example, as noted, Power Line probably rates as the toughest blog to read, but I don't find it particularly tough sledding.
