Quote:
Originally Posted by Dr. Drib
I would recommend his very first novel, "A Short History of A Small Place," with an understanding however, that his prose style is rich, dense, and sometimes difficult - and absolutely delightful (to me).
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Huh. After helping a guy making some calculations based on the
Gunning fog index I used the Count Pages plugin to calculate them for my entire library. I sorted by GF index, and guess what - the top three books were all Pearson books, with
Gospel Hour coming in at a whopping 27, followed by
Call and Response and
Off For The Sweet Hereafter at 26. Miltons
Paradise Lost came in fourth with a paltry 23, with some William Hope Hodgson and Proust in close pursuit. None of the latter are known for their simple language
The GF index is intended to be an approximation of grade level required for comprehension. To be fair, in my experience Gunning fog will often be a poor indicator of actual readability, especially for higher values. "Long words", for instance, is severely penalised, while they're not necessarily very detrimental to the readability of a well-written text. I haven't gotten around to starting any of the Pearson books yet, but now I'm intrigued
The two preceding paragraphs, by the way, apparently have a GF index of 15.08. Apologies to anyone without a bachelor's degree.
Edit: Without the initial "Huh." the GF index is 16.64. Who would've thunk that removing a single meaningless word would increase the target grade level by a year and a half?