8letters
Writing
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- May 27, 2013
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I know very little about F-K scores. Here are some 1-page EC stories with very different F-K scores:I'm suspicious of the Flesch-Kincaid scores. Novels and Novellas had one of the highest grade scores, so I went there and checked the last three days of stories. That's not a lot of stories.
Using the "style" tool on my desktop, the scores ranges between 3 and 7. Nothing approached the average of 10.8. I put some samples through on-line tests and came up with similar, but -- at least for Flesch-Kincaid -- slightly higher scores. Still, nothing approached 10.8.
Flesch-Kincaid uses the number of syllables/word and the number of words/sentence. Different automated tools are going to handle those variables differently.
I doubt that any of them count syllables/word. It's common to assume a representative number of words/syllable and estimated syllables/word from the average length of the word.
The measure of words/sentence is probably more of a problem. If the software assumes that sentences end with a full stop, then sentences ending with a question mark or exclamation point will be lumped into adjoining sentences, giving a higher score. If the software uses question marks and exclamation points to end a sentence, then sentences including dialog are splintered, leading to lower scores.
Generally, dialog in the analyzed text should result in a lower score, because dialog is usually a set of short sentences.
Flesch-Kincaid is commonly used in the US, but the rating was based on Navy technical manuals, and it was not intended for use with fiction. You can expect variable results.
Following Your Lead (3.23)
Campsite Tease (10.01)
Karen Takes The Lead (18.01)