Reading level tells you how many years of schooling you need to read and fully understand a piece of writing. Sometimes on the back of children’s books or on the copyright page you will see something like “RL 4”, meaning you need four years of schooling to be able to read it.
To give you a rough idea of things:
- 15+: Writing by generals and professors
- 13+: Too unreadable for most people
- 12: Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Bazaar
- 11: Time, Newsweek
- 10: Reader’s Digest, Cosmo, Plato, Gettysburg Address
- 9:
- 8: Ladies’ Home Journal, “Ivanhoe”, James Joyce, Abagond
- 7: Pulp magazines, Steinbeck, King James Bible
- 6: Comics, DH Lawrence, “Gone With the Wind”
- 5: “To Kill a Mockingbird”, Micky Spillane
- 4: nursery rhymes, books for grade school children
There is a website that can measure the reading level of blogs and most other websites:
For example, it says that this blog is written at a junior high school level, meaning it takes seven to eight years of schooling to be able to read and understand it.
Here are some blogs from my blogroll and some other websites and how they score:
- genius (over 18 years): The Economist.
- college (postgrad) (16-18 years): New York Times, BBC, The Black Snob, Michelle Malkin.
- college (undergrad) (13-16 years): the field negro, Raw Dawg Buffalo.
- high school (9-12 years): Racialicious, USA Today, Andrew Sullivan, The Root,
Steve Sailer, New York Daily News. - junior high school (7-8 years): Jack & Jill Politics, Abagond, Huffington Post, Stuff White People Like, Yahoo! News, What’s New Pussycat, New Yorker.
This makes sense: the New York Times is generally read by those with a university education, the New York Daily News by those without. The ads are pitched accordingly, by the way, with the Times having upmarket advertisers, the Daily News downmarket ones.
I love The Economist and think it is well-written, but writing at a genius level is generally a bad idea. You will lose most people simply because they lack the education for it. And even those you do not lose will have a harder time understanding you.
I think it is no accident that the blogs that were turned into books – What’s New Pussycat and Stuff White People Like – were both written at a junior high school level. It is no accident that the King James Bible is pitched at the same level.
So while some might look down on me for writing at a junior high school level, I think it is the right thing to do: the aim of writing is to be understood. So you want your writing to be as easy to understand as possible.
How to get the reading level for a piece of writing:
- reading level = 0.4 x ((words/sentences) + 100 x (complex words/words))
where a complex word is any word of three syllables or more not counting endings like -ed, -es and -ing.
Some simple ways to make your writing easier to read:
- Read it out loud.
- Use short words. Avoid words of three syllables or more.
- Use short sentences of 20 words or less.
- Use short paragraphs of four or five sentences.
See also:
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