The negative correlation between religiosity and writing level doesn’t surprise me, but I find it rather distressing that the average writing level for any of the demographics tops at the ninth grade level. This is a site where people are trying to present themselves as well as possible to sell themselves to others, and most of them write at a standard below the work of an average high school sophomore?
Subjective quality of writing, and objective quality of communication, don’t correlate all that well with reading level. Pretty much all the popular readability formulas use fairly simple functions of sentence length and percentage of hard words (i.e. not on a minimal vocabulary list), so prioritizing clarity and accessibility will tend to push readability scores down.
I just ran an arbitrary selection of articles from the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle through a Dale-Chall readability metric here; the results varied between 9th grade and a college sophomore level, with a median of about 11th grade. The most recent chapter of Luminosity scores at 9th or 10th grade level, while the most recent chapter of MoR lies at 7th-8th.
but I find it rather distressing that the average writing level for any of the demographics tops at the ninth grade level.
The tools used to evaluate the level of writing ability or even the quality of the specific test. The very nature of the questions being answered and the format appropriate to the context would play a large part in the ratings shown.
The negative correlation between religiosity and writing level doesn’t surprise me, but I find it rather distressing that the average writing level for any of the demographics tops at the ninth grade level. This is a site where people are trying to present themselves as well as possible to sell themselves to others, and most of them write at a standard below the work of an average high school sophomore?
Subjective quality of writing, and objective quality of communication, don’t correlate all that well with reading level. Pretty much all the popular readability formulas use fairly simple functions of sentence length and percentage of hard words (i.e. not on a minimal vocabulary list), so prioritizing clarity and accessibility will tend to push readability scores down.
I just ran an arbitrary selection of articles from the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle through a Dale-Chall readability metric here; the results varied between 9th grade and a college sophomore level, with a median of about 11th grade. The most recent chapter of Luminosity scores at 9th or 10th grade level, while the most recent chapter of MoR lies at 7th-8th.
The tools used to evaluate the level of writing ability or even the quality of the specific test. The very nature of the questions being answered and the format appropriate to the context would play a large part in the ratings shown.