"Readability"

Found a link by surfing from a friend's blog, in which she posted the results of a "readability" test. I didn't like the starkness of that version, which gave no explanations of the results or the criteria used to derive them, so I went to another site and got these results:

http://juicystudio.com/services/readability.php#readingresults

It helpfully explains different systems for measuring ease of reading. What's interesting is their phrasing; they talk about how easy it is to understand what you write. It says nothing about your level of intelligence, unless you consider your ability to communicate ideas clearly to be an intelligence quotient.I thought it odd that 2 of the indices purport to estimate how much schooling would be needed to read my blog, but those numbers came in with pretty different results - Gunning Fog says you'd need an 8th-grade education, while the Flesch-Kinkaid index says you'd only need a 5th-grade education. Maybe it depends on the quality of the school system. ;-)

The biggest flaw I see in these "tests" is that the key, or perhaps the only, criterion seems to be number of syllables in words, assuming a direct correlation between "difficulty" and number of syllables. These assessments don't address grammar (or lack thereof) or punctuation (yes, punctuation can affect meaning!). It's completely possible to obfuscate or be unintelligible using words of 3 syllables or less; you don't have to bring out the $10 words to produce confusing prose, though of course it helps. Conversely, it's also possible to communicate complex ideas clearly and concisely without requiring one's audience to know every word in the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary and without "dumbing down" your text.

One more example of why one should take these Internet "tests" with a generous sprinkling of salt.