How Readable Is Your Blog?
What caught my attention is a neat statistic that scores your blog’s readability level. It’s located near the end of the report:
Readability Level : ??? Grade
This score measures the approximate level of education necessary to read and understand the web page content. In most cases, the content should be made to be simple so that a majority of the target audience can understand it.
That’s great, but is it reliable? Well, there is no explanation on the grade scoring algorithm so I fetched a few scores for other sites I on similar topics but with different writing styles and compared them with Website Grader scores. Let’s see the results:
John Chow - 5th Grade
Shoemoney - 5th Grade
CashQuests - 6th Grade
Blogging Fingers - 6th Grade
DoshDosh - 11th Grade
Copyblogger - High School + 3 Year College
Problogger - High School + 3 Year College
Blogging Secret - Advanced Degree (PhD)
When you look at the blogs that have the same score, you’ll notice they are indeed similar. Shoemoney and John Chow both have simple and easily digestible writing stiles (although Shoemoney doesn’t give a damn about grammar). The same goes for CashQuests and Blogging Fingers. 5th and 6th Graders probably wouldn’t be able to understand the content, but they could surely read it without spelling.
DoshDosh is also clean written but its approach is a bit more professional, business-like. That makes it necessary to have a little bit more education than the blogs mentioned above to read it.
Copyblogger and Problogger are also very similar and often regarded as sister sites. Their writing is quite complex. Higher degree of education is really necessary to read them with ease.
Blogging Secret is seemingly a typical make money blog, but once you start reading it, you’ll understand why you need a PhD to comprehend its content. The grammar is simply horrible.
Final Verdict
Judging by the results, it’s obvious that the Readability Level scoring is not just popping-up random results, it clearly can interpret how readable a certain site is. I also believe that slight increments in grades don’t mean anything. What I mean is that it would be highly unlikely that a 5th grader would easily read through Shoemoney and then go to CashQuests and not be able understand a single word of its content.
I figure there is a span of 3 education levels you need to focus on when judging your blog’s readability level.
1. Lower grades - Your blog is simply written and it’s easy for readers to understand.
2. High School + College - Your blog’s writing is complex and a great deal of your readers will struggle to comprehend it.
3. Advanced Degree (PhD) - Start taking English lessons.
Could this tool be of use to you?
If you want to judge someone else’s blog readability level, this tool is worthless. You can be the judge of that.
When it comes to your own blog, it’s very likely that you will lack the objectivity and misjudge your blog’s readability level. In this case this tool will be helpful indeed!
Posted in Blogging Tips