Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
visitors since 1-8-07
The riveting and not-so-riveting ruminations of several loquacious vocabulary afficionados.
Contributors
Categories
Word Links
Some Favorite Word-Nerd-Type Books
- The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations by Charles Harrington Elster
- Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss
- English from the Roots Up
- A Middle English Reader and Vocabulary by Kenneth Sisam and J.R.R. Tolkien
- The New First Dictionary of Cultural Literacy by E.D. Hirsch, Jr.
- The One-Minute Philosopher by Montague Brown, Ph.D.
- The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
- What's in a Chinese Character by Tan Huay Peng
- words and The Word: notes on our Catholic vocabulary by Christopher Derrick
- A variety of Dictionaries, Encyclopedias and Thesauri
6 comments:
Says quite simply that the computer program in question is not at all genial itself. All it tells, I think, is how many difficult words there are per hundred words. Maybe also how many words there are between a capital letter and a full stop. If you had written consistently "basic English" (the thing of Ogden you know, reducing vocabulary to 800 words) and made a full stop followed by capital letter every three words, it would have given the result "childs play".
How does it "know" which words are difficult? Maybe it has a basic lexicon of 800 words and all else are "difficult", maybe someone or some poor university team has marked up every word as "common" (for "and") or "difficult" (for "eschew") or maybe it goes by sample texts that contain the easy words or examples of what "easy" and "difficult" English would look like, marking points for each similitude noted and giving whatever result has most points.
I was wrong about that Basic English thing
Now I am not amused, but bemused.
I suppose it depends upon what you mean by "amused". I was amused because I thought it took seriously the large words that we used primarily in jest. Apparently it's even more meaningless than I previously thought!
Meaning is a thing computers cannot handle at all. But I did think there was a smattering of statistics behind the reading level. I was at least wrong about how it worked.
actually I tested the test text on another readability test
there was one difficult word in a very short text:
the word "difficult" apparently has too many letters
Post a Comment