And Indyanna–yes, the coat for sure. That’s a coat you could put on in November and take off in March–it looks comfy enough to wear in the house!

I vote with the coat. Try separating the blue thing and see if they work with different alternative components.

I used to work closely with instructional designers and technical writers and people sometimes sweated bullets over these numbers. But the stress wasn’t about getting up to genius level, it was to get down to sixth-grade level.

The trick? These scales generally don’t measure whether the *writer* is a genius, they measure whether you have to be a genius to *figure out what the writer’s saying.*

The New Yorker, former home of Strunk and/or White, has a lower “genius” level because the magazine tends heavily towards articles that are very well written and meticulously edited. If you’re ranked on that end of the scale it’s because you’re a clear writer too. DailyKOS probably ranks more towards genius because they often present very complex information (statistics, technical jargon, inside baseball.) Atrios scores “better” because he tends towards very short, simple sentences with lots of, um, Anglo-Saxon words.

One last thing: the reason a 6th-grade reading level was the holy grail for technical writers *wasn’t* that their users were morons. Instead their users tended to be highly-skilled and very busy and therefore want to be able to skim for the information they needed very quickly.

All of which is a long way of saying “congratulations.”

figleaf

p.s. @Buzz: the statistical analysis behind the reading standards are complex but the algorithms themselves are pretty simple. A sample the size of the average blog front page (18 word-processor pages for Historiann, for instance) would be more than adequate.

None of those are true of the real me.

PS most of the “analyzers” that run algorithms about web sites are based exclusively on word length and sentence length, not content at all. I’m pretty sure that they come out of the “fog index” analyses newspapers developed to make sure their writing was accessible to the general public, which was assumed to have about a 9th grade education. So maybe those people who are mocking the “simplicity” of certain web sites should reconsider whether accessibility is a value, particularly in the public sphere.

Erica: you’re not selling me on the sweater suit. Doesn’t it look rather Maime Eisenhowerish? Jackie O., not so much (or at all!) Mamie–unfortunately, yes. (I could see Jackie in the sweater, paired with a tight pair of skinny-legged jeans, or those 60s-style ski pants, but not the skirt. Ever.)