Which Media, Marketing or PR Blog Is the Most Readable?

There are two parts to readabiliy. The first part is pretty mechanical - Gunning Fog and the rest can do a good job of testing that. The second part is writing with flair and style. This takes a bit of practice and unfortunately there's no button in Word that will do it automatically.

I did the actual test, and got a 10.97. Either I'm a brilliant judge of my own material, or blind lucky. Bet on the latter. Thanks for a very interesting post!

I'd rate my blog (www.errors-and-omissions.blogspot.com)an eleven. I try to make it simple to read, but I'm sure I drift into highfalutinism from time to time.

um... this is brilliant.I am very glad to see a low score on my blog! But it doesn't pay the bills.So to be fair I checked the print view of a recent press release on our web site. I looked at the print view to control for the previous post that commented about navigation changing the result. Although navs are short so logically this would improve (reduce) the score anyway.Ouch the Gunning-Fog index for our press release is 16.94. I won't link it. I will fix it. Thanks for the actionable post.Thanks!

I'm right there with you, Gary - want me to ask my Mom for her recipe?

Great, I'm at the same level as Ladies Home Journal, yet I still can't make a decent bundt cake...

6th grade. Perfect age to teach - not too obnoxious, but not sheep either.

I feel better. I just ran Stephen Hawking's site through it:5th grade.

Wow. I need to either increase the complexity of the words I use, or start taking the spaces out between words.I'm in between a 3rd and 4th grade level, but then, most AD's hate school anyway.

I got an 11.20, which puts me in the Time magazine category. Not bad considering my academic papers are supposed to be in the 15-20 range. ;)That was fun. Thanks!

For me, this post is definitely the tip of the week. I checked the scores on both of my blogs. As I suspected, my media blog came out OK. My second blog, which deals with education issues, has a somewhat higher score when it comes to reading ease. That didn't surprise me. It's definitely a challenge explain the No Child Left Behind Act at a 6th grade level. Still, I hereby pledge to remain cognizant of readability in all of my writings. :-)

My Gunning-Fog was 10.02However, looking at the other indices, there isn't a great deal of difference.The Orchard came in at a 5th grade reading level, AtP2 came in at 6th grade.Both were firmly in the mid-60s on the Flesch Reading Ease scale, with 60-70 being optimum.Neat tool, but it might just be easier for me to ask all twelve of my readers individually.

According to this, my blog is practically unintelligible ;-)I did always like big words, oh well.

Accurate or not, it is interesting. The scores also seem to match up to the type of blog. The ones with higher numbers tend to write longer posts while the ones with the lower numbers have shorter more frequent posts, and as has been pointed out, visual aids :-)Which is of course the difference between the 6th grade history book and the college text. IMO the important lesson is to make sure you are writing your blog in a readable fashion for *your readers.* If you only want phd's feel free to use the biggest longest words and most complicated sentence structure you can. You want to reach everyone on the planet, 6-7th grade level is a good pick. Most of us in PR/marketing lie somewhere in between.

I’m only slightly behind Cuban.Ok. I could live with that.;-p

See Kevin. See Kevin be jealous of Ronn Torossian's academia-level rating. See Kevin turn green. ;)

More like this then?See Scott. See Scott relate. See Scott relate to the public. Scott is in public relations. Go Scott, go!It's one of the reasons I always try and include a picture.

Heh. I hadn't heard of this yet. I guess J Hope is somewhere in the middle.Also, the phrase is, I think, "Never use a big word when a dimimutive one will suffice." ;)-kpaul

Hmm - we've done quite a lot of work on readability of press releases, etc. and are familiar with the Gunning-Fog index (and it's sibling, the Flesch-Kincaid index).Although there is no methodolody anywhere, it seems that this test measures the readability of the entire page (including all navigation and other text) rather than the blog posts themselves, so probably isn't the most accurate measure.As a bit of fun, it's fine, but don't read too much into it.

Oh, and if I left you out, don't be offended: My fingers got tired.Just follow the link and add your score in comments...