I entered the following text into the analyzer:
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.This Robert Heinlein quote yields a grade level of 15 (i.e. third year college or tech school) and a reading ease of 36.
Let's see how the analyzer works on this gem:
But deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics; revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility; and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of ``objectivity''. It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical ``reality'', no less than social ``reality'', is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific ``knowledge", far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities. These themes can be traced, despite some differences of emphasis, in Aronowitz's analysis of the cultural fabric that produced quantum mechanics; in Ross' discussion of oppositional discourses in post-quantum science; in Irigaray's and Hayles' exegeses of gender encoding in fluid mechanics; and in Harding's comprehensive critique of the gender ideology underlying the natural sciences in general and physics in particular.This produced a readability of minus 32 and a grade level of 32 (i.e. in school from age 6 to 38). It is, in short, utter bovine excrement. And, that was the intention all along.
Curious, I entered other text and tried again. The famous Lorem Ipsum text produced a readability of minus 1 and a grade level of 19.
The Check Text Readability tool allows a writer to get a handle on the level of their writing, and can serve as a warning that the text is unnecessarily complex. Ideally the readability of any text will be as high as possible. The grade level of the audience can also be considered. For instance, if the target audience is teenagers the grade should be around around 8 to 12. Here's another sample from something I wrote three years ago:
So, what should NASA be doing, beyond just developing those enabling technologies? If they are going to go about doing the Vision for Space Exploration, then what is the better way to do it?Grade 11 and 60 readability. It's simple enough for even a congressman to understand.
The solution is to decouple the mission from the implementation. It matters that it gets done, not that NASA does it or that the agency does it in a specific carved-in-stone way. NASA can't do it all by itself anymore, so it shouldn't even try. No more of this business of NASA building their own brand new launch vehicles and their own brand new manned capsules and their own brand new moon landers and their own brand new moonbases and micromanaging every detail. It is a brittle way of doing things, and the slightest hiccup in the yearly budget process or the slightest failure along that critical path brings everything to a screeching halt.