Saturday, November 3, 2007

I Am Exceedingly Amused by This...

(especially given the small amount of information actually included in this blog)

cash advance

6 comments:

Hans Georg Lundahl said...

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".

Hans Georg Lundahl said...

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.

Hans Georg Lundahl said...

I was wrong about that Basic English thing

Now I am not amused, but bemused.

love2learnmom said...

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!

Hans Georg Lundahl said...

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.

Hans Georg Lundahl said...

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