Annapolis Capital Punishment

Just when you thought it was safe to read blogs, CP has come across a way-cool website http://www.readability.info/ that instantly calculates the readability of the text of any blog, file or web-site. Using a series of different measures, it provides scores that roughly estimate the level of ease, or level of education needed to read the content, as well as whether the writing is clear or ambiguous. The FOG index and the SMOG index compares with school grades, for example, a 9 means ninth grade.

The below results were taken from CP at two different time, so scores varied. Basically it means that CP is being written for people with a high school education. The Flesch Index is suggested to be between 60 and 70 on a scale of 0 to 100.

Readability grades: Kincaid: 7.2
ARI: 8.1
Coleman-Liau: 10.9
Flesch Index: 72.6
Fog Index: 10.5
Lix: 38.3 = school year 6
SMOG-Grading: 10.0

readability grades:
Kincaid: 8.7
ARI: 9.9
Coleman-Liau: 11.4
Flesch Index: 66.9
Fog Index: 12.3
Lix: 41.5 = school year 7
SMOG-Grading: 11.2

For comparison, we looked at the Mayor's official blog,
http://ellenmoyer.blogspot.com/ and got these readability grades:
Kincaid: 8.1
ARI: 9.2
Coleman-Liau: 11.5
Flesch Index: 68.4
Fog Index: 10.8
Lix: 41.2 = school year 7
SMOG-Grading: 10.1

Here is her 2005 inaugural address:

readability grades:
Kincaid: 8.4
ARI: 10.5
Coleman-Liau: 13.4
Flesch Index: 65.5
Fog Index: 12.1
Lix: 44.8 = school year 8
SMOG-Grading: 11.2


Have fun visiting http://www.readability.info/ and checking out your writing.
( Next, we'll check Eric Smith and Joe Gross)