Can You Read Me?

This little reading level analysis tool is all the rage; I’m fairly happy with my result. But of course, the little badge is just a snapshot – what I really want to know is whether blogging has really helped my writing or not.

I found a WordPress plugin called Word Statistics, and made a quick page template to print out statistics for all ~2020 posts (if any WordPress-based readers want instructions for how to do this, I’d be happy to add them to this post). It was somewhat gratifying to find that my blogging habits do indeed reflect life events:

I’ve left the past two years un-annotated to protect the innocent; draw your own conclusions. The readability data are a little less clear:

You can see that my writing has gotten slightly harder to understand over the past six years. I have also been writing longer posts. If these trends continue, I will eventually be posting whole dissertations.