Hemingway essay grader1/25/2024 ![]() I always say that it’s because reading his work doesn’t feel like work. Jon Ronson is my favorite nonfiction writer. Nonfiction is a little different, but you’ll notice that these bestselling books tend to hover at or below ninth grade as well, with a few exceptions that are known for their difficulty (e.g., Good to Great is exceptional material but only really accessible to college students) or that were just crappy books (the authors who bought their own books in order to become bestsellers): He just likes to take six pages to describe a tennis court. And DFW, despite his sophisticated vocabulary and penchant for made-up words, manages to be understood quite easily. The writing itself, though, is quite comprehensible. Because War and Peace takes 60 hours to read, we think it’s more complex. We typically regard theirs as sophisticated and complex, but looking at the data makes me suspect that we only think that because their books are outrageously long. I was surprised that DFW and Tolstoy wrote between an eighth- and ninth-grade level. Note how none of these guys wrote above a ninth-grade level. Since fiction and nonfiction are not apples to apples, here’s a breakdown by category: Reading ease roughly correlates to reading index, but you’ll see that some of the works shift when calculated this way. ![]() Here’s a look at the reading ease of those same books: It estimates how fast a piece of writing is to get through. However, the point of this study is to show directional trends, which the average of the indices accomplishes nicely.Īnother highly regarded measure is the Flesch-Kincaid “Reading Ease” score. Proponents of various measures of readability may argue that some of these works should have slightly different relative rankings. This average generally is higher than the Flesch-Kincaid index itself. For the above chart, I ran everything through the five most popular calculators, and took an average. ![]() Flesch-Kincaid is the most popular calculator, but some scholars argue that other indices, like Gunning-Fog and SMOG (Stands for Simple Measure of Gobbledygook. What this shows is the approximate number of years of education one needs to be able to comprehend the text. Rowling) did seem to get more complex over time in the samples I ran.įor reference, I threw in a few other things: an academic paper about reading level indices, another paper about chess expertise, a Seth Godin blog post, the text of the Affordable Care Act, and the children’s book Goodnight Moon. For the most part, authors got similar scores across their books however, a few (e.g., Tom Clancy, J.K. ![]() I did run samples of a few authors’ different works in just for fun. It’s not perfectly scientific, since I didn’t run each author’s entire body of work through the machine. I grabbed each author’s most well-known work, pasting in enough text to gain a statistical confidence. I also ran some popular crime and romance novelists, a few political books I despise, and a couple of business writers who bought their way onto bestseller lists (i.e., their work wasn’t notable enough to sell on its own). Upon learning this, I did the only thing a self-respecting geek could do at that point: I ran every bestselling writer I had on my Kindle through the machine. That’s when I was really surprised:Īpparently, my man Ernest, the Pulitzer- and Nobel Prize-winning novelist whose work shaped 20th-century fiction, wrote for elementary schoolers. So I ran a reading level calculation on The Old Man and the Sea. I learned, to my dismay, that I’ve been writing for eighth graders.Ĭuriosity piqued, I decided to see how I compared to the first famous writer that popped in my head: Ernest Hemingway. After the chat, just for fun, I ran a chapter from my book through the most common one, the Flesch-Kincaid index: Scholars have formulas for automatically estimating reading level using syllables, sentence length, and other proxies for vocabulary and concept complexity. The other day, a friend and I were talking about becoming better writers by doing a “reading level analysis” of our work.
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