Friday, November 23, 2007

Geography Quiz: Reflections

Looking at the comments under the recent geography quiz, I retract the blame I assigned to my mouse. I'm impressed, y'all. And embarrassed.

Continuing in the self-flagellation mode, I guess there's no sense keeping this a secret any longer:

cash advance

I've been telling myself that this result was a compliment to the clarity of my prose, but that's seeming less plausible. Ten years of college, wasted.

In my own defense, Althouse rates at the junior high school level.

(h/t for the scoring link: Crankyprof)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

My blog's reading level is "unclassified". Which either means that it's below the level of utter idiocy, or the service provider doesn't like the utterly reprehensible naughty rudey word in the blog title.

As for the Joggers quiz - mouse-ular dexterity (combined with the time limit) IS a factor. I know exactly where Nice and the Cinque Terre are - my parents live fairly close to both - but in my haste to point and click, I always end up marooned somewhere in the middle of the Mediterranean.

John Evo said...

Brendan, I wouldn't sweat it. Several of my blogger friends rated "middle school" and I find their blogs intelligent and readable. Others have rated post-graduate and they seem the same to me. Whatever.

Anonymous said...

Reading level doesn't have anything much to do with sophistication or quality of content. It's a mechanical determination based on things such as number of subordinate clauses, number of multi-syllabic words, length of sentences etc. Lower level readers have trouble keeping multiple thoughts with subordinate clauses in mind and have to sound out phonetically longer words and things such as that. By writing concisely and keeping sentences short, you make your prose easier to read and thus it gets a "low" reading level score, which is no reflection on the profundity or quality of the content. Having a low reading level score is a positive and just says that your prose is easy to read, it doesn't say anything about the level of the content. A high reading level just means it takes a higher level reader to hack through the mushy, unclear prose. Higher is not necessarily better. Not to worry.

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