"What's the reading level of your favorite web site?" Topic

Just type in the URL and see what it says:

(expired link)

For the record, howardshirleywriter.com and my blog, howardshirley.blogspot.com , both had a reading level of Elementary School. (Which is good, as I wanted them both to be highly readable.)

My game site, members.aol.com/thegobspage has a reading level of Genius. (Appropriate for a spaceship combat site, I suppose.)

And our own TMP has a rating of Genius.

So congrats, everyone! If you understand this, you're a genius! :-)

Huh?

My favourite website is probably TMP, but my own website only ranks at a jr. high school level. I wonder what that says about me.

Here is the last website I read though:

link

It says that it is at genius level. So I guess I float between Einstein and SuperFudge.

so trying a bunch of different (wildly different) things, I get totally non sensible results.

hotornot.com gets college level for example.
It is pretty fun though, thanks for posting.

My blog is Genius level!

Is that good or bad? Does it mean that nobody can understand it? That would make sense, thinking about it.

Don't get it.

germy.co.uk is Elementary but miniger.com is Genius?

Irony being that I spelt the url wrong when posting about the genius of my site ;)

Yeah cos you're just talking about toys and they are talking about serious adult stuff like Viagra and bisexual dating.

That is totally college talk. Like the difference between White Zombie and REM. Sure White Zombie rocks and if Rob Zombie ever met up with the guy from REM his boots could stomp the snot out him all by themselves, but REM is college music and it wins out this time.

So you compare to White Zombie, that is a good thing.

I confess I am dubious about the reliability of this rating system…

Don't be so negative, Michael . It is obviously 100% accurate judging by its rating of my site.

Polynikes-

You only got a genius rating because of all the sand winkies. Sophisticated stuff, that.

Rich

I stand corrected.

Fun but keep in mind it only checks a single page. So my front page is at Elementary School, my Lexicon at Genius and other pages in between…

Well, since the front page of my G.O.B.S.! site consists of a big graphic image and the phrase: "[odometer] Admirals have perused this site since 3/10/05," it clearly doesn't take much to be a genius these days. Maybe only geniuses use the word "perused."

My site, ucs.mun.ca/~tmarshal is rated junior high.

All of my many blogs are genius level except for my Darkest Africa one which is only college level.

link

I'd love to know how it works. Perhaps including foreign names and words ups the rating..?

I'm sure all the technical terms increase the rating. How is it going to make sense of this, for example:

6th Cavalry Brigade, Colonel Dunnoski
1st “Krechowiecki” Ulans, 400 “riders”, Colonel Dziewicki
12th “Podolian” Ulans, 120 “riders”, Captain Komorowski
14th “Jazłowiec” Ulans, 400 “riders”, Major Plisowski

Things like that push my pages to college graduate level.

There are several well known readability tests. We were advised on their use in teacher training college. They range in sophistication greatly.

One of the more famous is Flesch-Kincaid, which I think is what Microsoft Word has built into it:
link

Frothers is Jr. High Level.

"Frothers is Jr. High Level."

This comes as no surprise to me at all.

If it rates as genius, that means you need to be of that level to understand it. So that would also mean that it has poor grammar and spelling, poorly constructed sentences etc. So you need to be smart to understand a website written by an idiot.

Likewise you actually need to be quite smart to write in a way that is simple enough for elementary school kids to understand.

My theory of course does not apply to frothers. Its the exception that breaks the rule.