Links for just-in-case

[alexr_rwx]

- There's a standard metric for how easy it is to read a text! (were you aware?) Apparently it's so common as to be a feature in many word processing programs. This is one way to generate the "reading level" of a particular chunk. ("That's at a ninth-grade reading level.") There are several ways to do this, actually.

- DepressingFilter: Communication is key. Often, in Japan, retired couples find they really don't know each other, after decades of never spending much time in the same space. Of course, it can't be talked about now, either. Result? Apparently, painful and quiet suffering on the part of the wife, who suddenly has to live with an effective stranger in her house.

- Less depressing, but weird! Electronic hugs, sent over text messages and Bluetooth, straight to your shirt!

- Aaaand, just in case you're falling from an airplane or something: How To Survive A Long Fall. (and these Atlantans want to get together and jump over and off of stuff, with you!)

Comments

[lindseykuper]

Oh, man, the Flesch-Kincaid. Ami Pro 3.1 used to spit out a bunch of statistics about how a document scored on all those things. In high school, I used to add long words to my papers until they hit at least 11 or 12.

After all these years, it's kind of a disappointment to see how simple the formulas really are. Back then I always assumed there was some kind of magic going on.

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

*nods* I can only wonder about how effective these things are... maybe they capture what they're supposed to, most of the time? Those scaling factors in there are pretty gross!

(although a better metric might take into account sentence structure and relative rarity of words. Is this enough of a problem where a new one should be developed, do you think?)

[lindseykuper]

Maybe. Sentence structure and relative rarity, yeah. And also, maybe it's true that a combination of short and long sentences is more readable than either all-short or all-long. So we'd need to measure the standard deviation in sentence length, one way or another. I guess I'd need to do some thinking about what "readability" really is.

You know what's cool about talking to you, Alex? You almost always ask me an interesting question!

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

*smiles* Yay intellectual stimulation. That's what people are here for, right?

(as for notions of readability: maybe the way to handle this is with some empirical testing -- we try to find some correlation in mental load (with the NASA TLX, which is apparently standard?) with different metrics on texts, and see how students from different grades stack up? I imagine that reading abilities don't go up linearly...)