The literary world - especially academics - has a number of readability metrics that show how “hard” a given work is to read in English. If you are a writer, these metrics can give you a pretty good swag at how easy it will be for people to read your work.

In this article, I’ll show you a very simple way to gauge your own readability by using your RSS or Atom feed. (I’ll also talk about a fun way to analyze the word-smithing prowess of your readers.)

Qualitative Wordsmithing

Readability metrics use factors like words per sentence, multisyllabic frequency, and so on. These are three of the more common ones:

• Flesch Reading Ease: Measures sentence structure and complexity to determine how easy it is to read without stopping and re-reading, etc. Higher is better, but between 60 and 70 is a good score.
• Flesch-Kincaid Grade: What grade of school you will have needed to complete to handle the writing style and structure. Needless to say, this doesn’t reflect subject matter. A score of 5 that deals with quantum mechanics will only apply to 5th graders who already understand quantum mechanics. A score of 17 is something best left to grad students, who will probably curse you for it.
• Gunning Fog: Measures the obfuscation of meaning; the lower the number, the better. TV Guide is a 6. Government cover-ups and legal papers score 20 to 30.

Online Tool Time

Running the stats for these metrics by hand isn’t something a human needs to do. There are several online tools that will analyze your website/blog and give you readability scores. My personal favorite is the Readability Test by Juicy Studio.

The problem with such tools is that they only look at your homepage, so the results are skewed by static content like navigation or “About Us” blurbs. They are also - in most cases - only getting a small working set of articles to score. If you have reader comments showing up on your home page, that content will change your score as well.

The fact of the matter is that you probably don’t want to analyze your homepage, you really want to measure the readability of your content. There’s good news here: although the online tools like the one by Juicy Studio were intended to analyze web pages, they can be used in a much more powerful way.

The Feed Shows How You Read

Here’s a easy way to get better scores without static content interference and with more content to analyze: Use your full-text RSS or Atom feed URL instead.

The online readability tools are designed to ignore HTML markup, so they happily ignore the XML markup in RSS or Atom as well. That leaves you with a pretty high ratio of real content to be scored. Most feeds have 10 or 20 items in them, which is way more content than is on the typical home page.

The main caveat here is that you need to publish a full-text feed to get a realistic score. A smaller caveat is that some feed configurations will duplicate the content (partial text and full text in the same feed item), but that won’t have much effect.

For example, The Juicy Studio tool scores the TechBrew site and feed with these differences:

As you can see, the feed provides a much larger sample of content. I’m pleased to note the Flesch Reading Ease scores are consistent, but it would appear that you’ll need to be nearly in 7th grade to be a happy subscriber. (For an explanation of the scores, go back to the top of this article. You skimmer.)

Trolling for Comments

Less practical but more fun is when you use this same technique on a website’s comment feed. Many blogs provide an RSS or Atom feed of just posted comments. That feed provides a unique - but admittedly not very sophisticated - way to measure the sophistication (or obfuscation) of a site’s reader base.

For example, here are the Flesch-Kincaid Grade for the reader comments at some well-known sites:

• Robert Scoble: 5.70
• TechBrew.net: 4.81
• TechCrunch: 4.56
• Gizmodo: 2.99

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions on this one.

Word Power: Better Readability, Next Time

I’ll conclude with a practical tip: Take a look at your own feed and check out your scores. You may see something you’d like to improve.

If you have Microsoft Word, you’ve actually got a nice set of readability metrics right at your fingertips. Use Tools > Options and in the “Spelling and Grammar” tab check the “Show Readability Statistics” box. (The grammar and style checks are also pretty thorough, if you can stomach them.) Whenever you finish your spellcheck, a Readability Statistics dialog will show you your stats. (Click the image to the right to see a larger sample.)

Happy editing!

“Half my life is an act of revision.” - John Irving

Nov 14, 2007 Update: Revised to improve flow. I had to eat my own dogfood on this one.