Quote:
Originally Posted by Man Eating Duck
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 has 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? |
Could you dumb this post down a bit? I didn't understand a word of it (other than the initial Huh...)
