I’ve Always Thought Pretty Highly of Myself, But…
According to the “blog readability test,” not only am I a genius for writing this stuff, y’all are geniuses for reading it. So congrats.
I’ll just point out that whatever calculation they do probably doesn’t take into account typos and misspelled words, which unfortunately abound all over the site.
Mine is high school.
Irony?
Mike Meginnis
November 15, 2007 at 3:08 pm
I plugged in a few other blogs just to see how they would rate. The results are as follows:
Genius – Yglesias (Matt, you are obviously correct that the program doesn’t account for typos)
College (postgrad) – Oliver Willis, Jon Swift
College (undergrad) – Steve Benen, Garance, Pandagon
High School – McArdle, TBogg
Junior High – Sadly No, Shakespeare’s Sister, Josh Marshall(!)
Dillon
November 15, 2007 at 4:45 pm
Well, it’s worth pointing out that *clarity* would probably *reduce* your reading level, which makes Josh Marshall’s placement perfectly logical.
Or it would, if McArdle wasn’t in Highschool with me. Her main approach to argument is explaining to people how completely they’ve misunderstood her.
Oh well!
Mike Meginnis
November 16, 2007 at 7:28 am
The methodology is crap; ratings change from one post to the next (and I am just saying that because I had a high school rating.) But maybe if I blogged as ‘Matt Quixote’ the rating would improve?
Quixote
November 19, 2007 at 8:58 pm
Last time I looked, my little blog also got the high school designation. I was momentarily nonplussed. For my money, however, the best prose among the many bloggers I read is to be found on the pages of Kevin Drum’s site (www.washingtonmonthly.com). Very clear, highly readable guy whose writing tends to be quite conversational in nature. And yes, when I ran Kevin’s blog through the readability test, Drum, too, was a measly high schooler like me. So there.
Jasper
November 23, 2007 at 5:30 pm
Whoops. Poor Kevin Drum. He’s now down to Junior High School. Should have checked before I wrote.
Jasper
November 23, 2007 at 5:32 pm
I don’t like this metric. This heuristic inversely correlates readability to intelligence: the less readable you are, the more intelligent you must be. We don’t give enough credit to how hard it is to take complex ideas and break them down so as to be easily consumable by the masses. Lucid writing shows a clarity of thought. Anyone who has taken a philosophy class knows how easy it is to throw in big words and obscure references to obfuscate the weakness of your argument.
Of course, Matt, while you have the genius designation, I would still consider you an excellent writer.
Jason
November 25, 2007 at 9:52 am