More Vital Statistics

Those of you who read my recent post regarding my, erm, personal measurements might be interested in another set of statistics. Over at Swish Cottage, David has conducted a fascinating analysis of the writing style of some of his favourite weblogs using Microsoft Word's under-utilised grammar-checking functionality.

Ever competitive, I immediately needed to know where my average Characters Per Word score ranked against the other sites that he analysed. I pasted in the full text of my recent four Dublin posts, which collectively represent the longest thing I've written for a long time. Here are my results:

So, what do we deduce? Well, my paragraphs are long by comparison to some, but not outlandishly so. Equally, my average number of words per sentence is on the high side, but not off the edge of the scale. Generally my average number of characters per word is very, well, average (maybe I should have mentioned that my time in Dublin caused me to meditate on the fundamental principles of antidisestablishmentarianism).

My percentage of passive sentences is about where I would expect it to be, as it's a common fault in my writing style that I actively (hah!) have to guard against. My Flesch Reading Ease is lower than all but two of the other sites surveyed, which I would imagine is down to the fact that I use too many clauses (commas) and digressions (hyphens) in my sentences. It's maybe also influenced by the fact that I've tried to make my weblog style more conversational recently - I would certainly write more formally and concisely at work.

Finally, the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level is the school grade (USA) or year (UK) that you apparently need to be to understand the text - my level means that those below fifteen years old are very unlikely to have a clue what I'm talking about. God, if it were only such a small section of the population.

Haven't I taken it so seriously, dahlings? Well, yes and no - the preceding sentence alone probably just dropped my reading ease by five percent. It's true that even when I do stuff for pleasure, I like to know how well I'm doing it. A low score wouldn't necessarily compel me to improve myself (okay, we all know that's a huge fat LIE: yes, it would), but it gives me some objective feedback about what I'm doing here, because I'm really far too close to it to have any clue.

More generally, kudos to David for having the imagination to put his original set of stats together. Most of us have these tools hanging around on our computers and we rarely use them. As part of my job involves wringing more value out of existing IT systems, I wholly approve of this fascinating exercise. I wonder if it'll inspire me to come up with an idea of my own? Maybe I'll write an entire post using Word's 'Track Changes' feature, so you can see exactly how many times I edit an average piece before it gets posted.

[Getting even more self-referential, I ran the above prose through Word's grammar check. My averages are pretty similar, but my Grade Level has already gone up a notch. If the trend persists, by Christmas this site will be totally incomprehensible to anyone under the age of a hundred.]

Posted by Hg on Thursday 05 September 2002 at 21:07.
Received 1 comments so far.

Well, that's great. Now I know every idiot can read my site. I write like a 12 year old.

Comment by Caroline on Saturday 07 September 2002 at 00:54.

http://www.hydragenic.com/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/hydragen/mt/mt-tb.cgi/473

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