According to this I write YA stories

[twopoint]

I usequestails for her computer geniousness. 

After the Singapore Incident, I went a-searching for online document storage because emailing stories and notes to myself (and backing it all up on three separate flash drives, or posting it and locking it here) didn’t fully satisfy my ocd. I discovered some nicely recommended storage sites, but I’ve successfully locked myself down with anti-malware everything and the sites won’t allow me to upload without turning it off, which I cannot do because something might explode.

So I askedquestails and she put up with my ignorance magnanimously (as always) and said, why don’t you just use the document feature on gmail?

Oh.  

I’ve been playing with gmail docs for a couple weeks now and I love it love it love it. I love that I can email stories in and send draft links without attachments to whomever I want (the rest of you might not share in my ease of sharing). It’s clean text that keeps the style definitions so that I can copy and post without having to fiddle with font, unlike Word 07 which is of the devil, notepad takes too much out, etc.  

Curious about word count last night, I searched around to see if there was any difference between Word and gmail and discovered – my writing is easily understood by the average eleven year old and I typically write at the fourth grade level according to the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Tests. Occasionally, rarely, I step up to the fifth grade level. That puts me about even with Reader’s Digest and a little better than our local disaster of a newspaper. 

I’m sure Word offers the same information, but I never go deeper than the word count at the bottom of the screen. I know the tests don’t qualify as ratings, if it did, my fondness for a certain word that begins with f would push me at least into middle school (where I will eternally remain in heart and action). So, I’m going to be more polysyllabic this week. I’m going to keep tellingquestails that she’s magnanimous, because she is.  Andvictoriawiley, who writes shopping lists at the doctorate level, I’m going to tell her that she’s perspicacious, because that’s why I love her, and with her help I will use more semi-colons and develop complex sentence structures and I will finally understand the past perfect tense. I will try, and fail, to stop beginning sentences with And and But. 

So, using Flesch-Kincaid, who is your target audience?

Comments

[lonely-lycanth.livejournal.com]

Just for fun, I typed this sentence into google docs:

"It intrigued me to discover that your Flesch-Kincaid Reading Level was so miniscule; however, the readability of your writing definitely benefited."

That sentence received a grade level of 18.00, and a Reading Ease of 0.21. It's not ninth grade level, but it kind of illustrates what the test is going for. It doesn't measure the concepts in your sentence, but the use of vocabulary by averaging your syllables, and sentence structure. Simple active voice sentences get lower grade scores and higher readability, whereas things like passive voice, multiple independent clauses, and a variety of dependent clauses (noun, adverb, adjective clauses), make readability more difficult and raise the grade level.

I get higher scores because I play with sentence structure and clauses quite often. Also, I tend to favor long sentences with multiple clauses rather than breaking up a united idea. (For fun, the above paragraph got a 10.00 with a Reading Ease of 51.59!)

[two-point.livejournal.com]

I knew passive voice would make my sentences more complex, there had to be a reason I used it so often.

I'm going to go play with this all night, but the longer I think about it all, the more it sounds like math and math makes my brain explode.

Reading Ease of 51.59! Comparatively, I shouldn't be able to comprehend that paragraph. I hearby vow to be more complex.

[lonely-lycanth.livejournal.com]

Actually, the reading ease score is supposed to be higher. The lower the score, the more difficult the passage. I think it goes up to 120 or something. It's supposedly a tenth grade paragraph.

It's not so much that passive voice makes the sentence more complex as that it inverts the sentence, slowing the pace down and making it harder to read. That's why your grammar school teachers always told you to avoid it. In general, that's good advice, unless it really matters that the subject the receiver of the action. If it's not essential to the meaning, passive voice can sound like you're avoiding the topic or being wishy washy, but mostly it's just that active voice sounds more lively and direct.

Clearly I spent too much time in writing and lit class.

[two-point.livejournal.com]

The very, very sad thing is that speciality high schools for writers, two BA's with a writing focus, writing workshops, start of an MFA in writing and numerous other writing things behind me . . . I do not know this stuff.

Actually, they should ban me from writing. I drive my betas to drink.

[lonely-lycanth.livejournal.com]

Actually, I learned more in a one semester linguistics night class than I did in all my years of grammar and high school. The professor who taught that class is absolutely brilliant. Mostly, though, I'm just a grammar nut.