Is this good or bad?
It's been ages since I've had time to even read the blogs, let alone post -- I miss the blogosphere! -- but getting caught up tonight I ran across polyglot conspiracy's and Mr. Verb's blog readability evaluations: Post-Grad! So of course I immediately plugged in HeiDeas, and what did I get?
Ack! Maybe Post-Grad is too fancy for a blog, but surely I should be hitting at least 'Undergrad', as pg reports the Log does? Not even High School!? Must get more hi-falutin' pronto! How can anyone respect a rating like that?
Let's see... I know! I'll include a ton of fancy grammar words in this post and then reevaluate.
accusative
nominative
matrix
dependent
complementizer
imperative
declarative
interrogative
conditional
determiner
modal
predicate
intransitive
ditransitive
transitive
synthetic
fusional
irregular
constituent
coordination
privative
binary
preposition
adposition
postposition
tense
aspect
perfect
pluperfect
futurate
causative
applicative
benefactive
desiderative
malefactive
That oughta do it... stay tuned!
Update: No effect!! I'd like to see a junior high school student use the word 'postposition' in a sentence! damn. Ah well. Maybe it's good; I'm readable beyond the dreams of readability.
Update update: You know, I bet it's that post about Harry Potter and speech act theory. I could experiment by taking it down, but now I've included the words "Harry Potter" in this post, so it'd be for naught. Rats!
posted by hh @ 7:49 PM
10 Comments:
Good to see you back Heidi!
I got high school for anggarrgoon. Did you look at the code for embedding the readability graphic? It seems to embed a bunch of ad links too.
~~Claire
Teehee. SN is “genius”. Too much Latin on the front page!
Have you tried playing with the punctuation and with words like "ack"? This blog post for example uses lots of exclamation marks (I'm not condemning this, personally I think the good ol' ! is mightily underused). It might also be an effect of sentence length. Just a guess
PS. If it's any consolation one of my blogs is elementary school: Deserteats.blogspot.com
The other is Genius: lingpeerpressure.blogspot.com
No rhyme or reason there...
I agree with Claire - it does embed a lot of crappy stuff (I checked the code and removed the weird links). I don't know the rhyme or reason either, but - maybe it's your copious references to the Simpsons? It'd be interesting to see the algorithm. It'd furthermore be interesting to compare results to, say, MS Word's Fleishman-Kincaid reading level test (Or whatever it's called).
hi everybuggy!
yes, I got rid of the ad code in the graphic -- that's pretty annoying, isn't it?
good thought about the punctuation, simpsons, etc. ah well. I'll just have to being the pig latin to sn's actual latin. :)
there's a missing 'resign myself to' in, or rather not in, that last comment. no wonder i'm jr hi level...
Hi. I found your site via Tenser, said the Tensor.
I tried a variety of sites in that blog readability test and the results were just wrong. NLPers blog, which is a really technical computational linguistics blog, got high school! I don't think so!
There's another readability site that breaks down the metrics. What you'll see is that average number of syllables per word and average number of words per sentence are the main criteria:
http://juicystudio.com/services/readability.php
Hurrah, HeiDeas is back.
Chris and Andrew are definitely right that there's no clear correlation between reading level of a blog in any real sense and the 'grade' it gets. One of the anonymous commenters over at Mr. V tried a bunch of sites and got insane results. And a colleague did the same with a lot more with the same result.
It's better to be understandable anyway, right? Otherwise why not just post encrypted text? :P
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