Reading Age

Has anyone checked the reading age of their stories out? Try http://www.read-able.com/
Not to be taken tooooooooooo seriously!!

I put in my "Getting His Attention", which is one of my few stories with a sex scene ... it tells me:

This page has an average grade level of about 3.

It should be easily understood by 8 to 9 year olds.

Wow! It's scary what little kids understand these days.

I put in several of my recent stories, getting results that ranges from Grade 3 (Traveling Spankerman) to Grade 6 (What the Limo Driver Saw).

Looking at the description of the various indices - which calculate 'readability' based on length of words, length of sentences, and factors like that, I don't think that a low grade level in any way indicates 'immature' writing. In fact, the whole focus seems to be that simpler is better. Nothing really looks at vocabulary (other than through the simplistic measure of word length) or sentence structure (beyond sentence length), let alone the complexity of thoughts. Narrative writing SHOULD shy away from many long words and long sentences (I admittedly have trouble with the latter one).

I think I know why our stories will get low scores. The tests are partly based on the number of syllables per word and length. So when comes to something like:

SMACK! CRACK! "Nooo!"

Those are three sentences, each of a single one syllable word. Any text like will send the average dropping like a stone.

Goodgulf

I wonder: would it be possible to see, whose stories are most easy to read, those written by
people from countries where English is the national language or those written by people from
other countries.

Hehe that is fun...

My Alicia's Awakening is understandable by grade 7 ie children of 12 to 13 and Sally's Hebdomadal meeting is the same.

Missing gets... This page has an average grade level of about 8. It should be easily understood by 13 to 14 year olds.

I checked the readability level of my stories - it was 4th to 5th grade. So I e-mailed a couple of my stories to the 4th grade teachers around town, and asked them to have their students read the stories, just to be sure MS Word had it right. So far, no reply. Should I send some to the 3rd grade teachers??

Cal33

I think it should go to every teacher in the school district, plus a few neighboring ones. You want to be thorough. Maybe even their high school students are reading at barely a 4th grade level.

[quote=Cal33]So I e-mailed a couple of my stories to the 4th grade teachers around town,[/quote

Hmmm...it just might be the grade 4 teachers are rounding up their paddles to show you how well they can spank when you suggest some of your stories by read by grade 4 students...I would bet the spanking itself will rate much more then a average grade 4 student would get....LOL

Canadian Spankee