![]() ![]() Would you rather write like the article was suggesting? In order to “succeed” should we dumb down our blog posts? We should not. Far from being at an 8th grade level, the Flesch Kincaid Grade Level analysis put Blood Meridian–at least this passage–at grade level 14.6, requiring around 2.5 years of college to be easily understood. Have you ever heard the word “endarkenment” before? Me neither. He’d long forsworn all weighing of consequence and allowing as he did that men’s destinies are ever given yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and said so and he’d drive the remorseless sun on to its final endarkenment as if he’d ordered it all ages since, before there were paths anywhere, before there were men or suns to go upon them.” Whether his history should run concomitant with men and nations, whether it should cease. He would live to look upon the western sea and he was equal to whatever might follow for he was complete at every hour. “He watched the fire and if he saw portents there it was much the same to him. I didn’t believe this result, so I grabbed this passage from Blood Meridian I had laying around and ran it through the same test. He uses a rarefied vocabulary, pushing words to the limits of their sense. I don’t think I’d’ve had an easy time reading him in 8th grade. He writes long, complex sentences, employing odd structures, repetitions, sentence fragments, and a strange, almost Biblical language. If you’ve read McCarthy–a great favorite of mine–you’ll know that he demands a lot from his readers. The author claims that Cormac McCarthy–Cormac McCarthy!–writes at an 8th grade level. I ran my blog posts through this analysis after ending up on an article about how the most successful writers–by successful they mean getting on a best-seller list– write for an audience reading at an elementary or middle school level. ![]() According to the site, I’m limiting my readership. Turns out I am writing at a college level, and that is, according to this article, a cause for alarm. My blog posts get a “D” for readability as graded by this web site, because my sentences are too long and the vocabulary I use is too advanced. ![]()
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