Update: My husband’s response to the notion of “dumbing down” my blog was too pithy not to share:
Yeah. You need to stop writing for 18th century farmers and start writing for 21st century college kids.
Update 2: Dharmesh Shah, the developer of Website Grader, was kind enough to stop by and tell me a little about how the program determines readability. Old way: Flesch-Kincaid. New way: Gunning Fogg index. And that last site gives yet more info. The “problem” with my site is the fact that 34.23% of words used have three or more syllables. (I can’t believe this post is actually generating updates.)
Like any blogger, I appreciate all of my commenters. I really enjoy the fact that most of you leave thoughtful comments. Some of you even occasionally post comments which are as long as the post, even though my posts tend to be a bit longer than average, I believe. And most of you homeschool, so I already knew I had an educated readership.
But now it is official. In an online forum, Writing Thoughts shared Website Grader, a handy little tool designed to grade your site and give you suggestions to improve. Most interesting to me was the following:
Readability Level: Advanced Degree PhD
I like that, but apparently it may be detrimental to my traffic.
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.
Oh well. I say my target audience comprises those who can read at a college level, and perhaps even prefer to. I suspect that is why some of you gave up the newspaper.
I hereby award all of my readers who read and understand this blog an honorary doctorate in Educational Republitarianism from Homeschool U. Congratulations, and bear your honor with pride.
It is either that or “dumb down” my blog.
Related Tags: Website Grader, blogging
Principled Discovery is a place to stop and discuss news and information related to faith, family and particularly education. Pour yourself a cup of tea and join the conversation! 
hey Dana, if it is any comfort.. I got the same result for my blog in readability level.. Advanced Degree PhD .. and I am not dumbing down mine either!
Maybe homeschool websites like ours should start the “PhD club award”? LOL
I guess we aren’t concerned much about appealing to the masses.. but to stretch and expand people’s thinking.
Could be the whole thing is just a marketing tool for us to buy the guy’s services…
It places fhoto of Madeleine in your bloggue
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I think it is because we both use polysyllabic words and sentences which are longer than five words. Actually, most of those readability things I have ever seen (including what some word processors provide) go predominantly on sentence length.
So either we’re bad at run ons or we like our appositives.
I got the same result on readability. Using words with more than eight letters and sentences with commas will probably earn this rating. You know, from an eighth-grade perspective, everything can look like PhD-level writing.
I tell ya, I just have smart readers…or a PhD ain’t what it used to be.
Maybe that explains the interesting logic of university professors.
Alright, what’s up with blogger now? It says I have two comments but when you click on it, here they all are.
Strange. Maybe it will catch up later. Or maybe google only reads at a fourth grade level and is having difficulty processing all of your intelligence.
So glad I finally got Blogger to work for me. I couldn’t comment since I got back online last month.
Congrats on the baby!!!! Congrats on being a PhD blog too. I’m almost nervous to see what I get. Maybe I’m a newspaper. lol.
My readability score was only 7th Grade. I can’t write as deep as you ~ I use up my quota of brain cells reading your blog!
Julie (Now blogging at Shanan Trail)
That’s surprising…but I don’t think I’m particularly “deep” over here. Just good at long sentences.
Hi Dana!
Thanks for the link.
My blog’s readability was 11th grade, for whatever it’s worth.
LOL That is too funny, mine got the Advanced Degree PhD rating too. LOL Yours I believe, mine, yeah right.
Your blog is far better than mine. I’ve also taken a break to work in the yard for the last few weeks as it refreshes my brain cells and gives me a chance to take my frustrations of the world out on the dirt.
I received terrible grades in English while growing up so I don’t have the confidence that I can write, but at least I try. I figure that with practice comes improvement, so blogging gives me a little practice.
ok, we need an educated bloggers blogroll. For those of us who aren’t particularly interested in those brief, one-line instaposts and actually flesh out ideas, complete with clauses and polysyllabic words. A properly used semicolon now and again would be nice, too.
I’m the developer of WebsiteGrader.com
First off, thanks for using the tool. I hope you found it moderately useful.
As for the readability grade, the software was indeed using a widely recognized algorithm (Flesch-Kincaid) to calculate readability. I’ve since switched it to use the Gunning Fogg index (which is more widely known).
You may want to rerun your website through and see if you get a different result.
Also, we’ve made major enhancements to the tool recently, so it’s likely worth revisiting regardless (and you can enjoy it for free while it’s in beta).
Cheers,
Dharmesh Shah
Hey, thanks for visiting! And for the information! As you can see, we are not the most serious about the profitability of our blogs around here, but who doesn’t like to see where their efforts score?
Hi Dana, I’m not surprised at your Advanced Degree score I could have guessed at this score simply because of the times you have mentioned Carnivals without clarifying what that is. Maybe because of your higher inteligence, you forget that there are many of us out here (some of us who have visited your blog several times) who need more direction about stuff we are not familiar with.
Do keep up your good work and hopefully eventually the lesser educated among us will catch up.
I must add, I have just read through and am still not entirely sure what you mean by carnival.
Gee whiz, Lee, don’t be so hard on yourself. I certainly am not of “higher intelligence.” I just found the grader tool interesting and mildly amusing.
A carnival is nothing more than a collection of links. Everyone interested in submitting gives the link to the editor and the editor puts them all together in a single post. Ideally, everyone who participated then posts a link back and everyone enjoys each other’s posts.
I didn’t really get it until the first time I participated.
Generally, when there is a short post linking to a carnival with no further explanation, it is because I participated, am reciprocating with a link, but have not yet had time to really look at it. That is why the subject comes up frequently. But I’ll post a full post just for you.
Not being familiar with something has nothing to do with intelligence. (Nor does the Gunning Fogg Index.)
Hey I have a GED and never went to college and I scored a PhD rating too! I think I even have a properly used semicolon or two lurking on my blog….
My blog received the same rating - Advanced Degree (PhD), so I plugged in my public access show website (www.shesright.org), which is very limited in text, just to see what would happen, and it received a rating of “High School + 3 Year College.” That’s funny.