Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Lies, damn lies (and statistics)

Words: 24,067
Characters: 104,714
Paragraphs: 496
Sentences: 1,900
Sentences per paragraph: 3.9 (though based on the entries above, it would be 3.83)
Words per sentence: 12.6 (again, 12.67)
Characters per word: 4.1 (again, 4.35)
Passive sentences: 2% (estimated 38 sentences)
Flesch Reading Ease: 82.8
Flesh-Kincaid Grade Level: 4.8

That last line bothers me. My writing is at a 5th grade level? Am I some kind of moron? I mean, I know I've never written a novel before, but I would have thought my writing to be a little higher than that. I guess I was wrong. Wait, let me try an experiment...

Okay, I pasted the text into a new document and took out the 5,010 words of dialog. Running statistics on this, I get Flesch Reading Ease 80.1 (slightly lower), Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level 5.4 (slightly higher).

Yep. I'm a writing dunce.

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