Wednesday 7 May 2008

Foggy

One entry is needed for this (thanks to the Doorman Priest, where I saw this first, who has put his on the side):

blog readability test


His is undergraduate level, so I'm a bit higher than him.

Now let us all be memes and click on the display to find the readability levels for blog after blog.

In order to protect the status of the reading level here acquired, and it not being weakened by this simple entry, I include an extract from the Archbishop of Canterbury's recent lecture (1 May) on Religious Faith and Human Rights (London School of Economics), which I have commented upon. Notice the textual error. Can you spot it?

And the sexual involvement or non-involvement of the body is a primary locus for the making of sense; denial of this liberty is the denial of something absolutely fundamental (which is why sexual abuse is indeed a prime instance of rights being violated, the body becoming an instrument for someone else's 'meanings', a tool for the construction of another person's sense-making. The recognition of a body as a human body is, in this framework, the foundation of recognising the rights of another; and to recognise a body as a human body is to recognise that it is a vehicle of communication. It is not a recondite point.

5 comments:

Erika Baker said...

I tried entering Mad Priest's URL but was told they couldn't do anything with it.
He's truly off the scale!

Question is: what level is most suitable for a blog that wants to reach as many as possible? Can you be too shallow? Or too complex?

Pluralist (Adrian Worsfold) said...

Mad Priest's is High School.

The lower it is, the more people it reaches. The trick is to be like Winston Churchill where some complex ideas are carried in the simplest and most Anglo-Saxon language. Still, it can prove incapable of carrying more complexity to some people and can be boring if consistently made simple.

Erika Baker said...

I only just worked out that you have to change the http to www. I am clearly only a primary school level reader.

Mad Priest depends on his latest post - the current one puts him at "College, Undergraduate".
And Tobias Haller, needless to say, is Genius.

Is the score influenced by clarity of writing? I'd love to know how it works!

Pluralist (Adrian Worsfold) said...

There is a proper way of doing it called the Fog Index...

It may use that way. I have always been accused of being too complicated in speech, and it is a principal reason why my teaching career was unsuccessful.

Doorman-Priest said...

I toned mine down. It was originally "Genius level."