10 February 2014

Notes - free will / no comment / Stats for Chapters 13, 14, 15 / readability tests

         Mid-morning. You are about to do your exercises which you have been doing consistently except for Friday and Saturday last. Thursday you had forty minutes and yesterday thirty-five, mostly though you stick to thirty-minute sessions. You have stats to put together today so you are ready to move on to the next three chapters. – Amorella

         0955 hours. I am beginning to see the end of the tunnel as far as book ‘four’ is concerned (book one of GMG). Eventually I will have to decide how to set up the publishing. Yesterday’s post suggests that I do not have free will. This is not correct. 

         Then change yesterday’s post while posting this. - Amorella

          1007 hours. I reviewed yesterday's post. I erred. In context what you say is true, you give me no choice (in here) but to be honest. This is not the same as having free will. I have the free will to shut the blog down if I wish but I do not wish to do so. The blog allows me to 'vent' my thoughts and in doing so I become freer in my ability to write from the unconscious via you, Amorella.

            Post. - Amorella

         1154 hours. I have the statistics completed but I forgot to set a theme word for each of the chapters.

         You were going to write “Unbelievable” next but you know it is not true. – Amorella

         It is almost noon. I am going to take a break.

         No one is stopping you, boy. – Amorella

         After noon. Carol is readying for errands and lunch at Panera (her favorite veggie soup is on three days a week and this is one of them). You are looking for help for your themes because these small but important aspects are somewhat foreign to you and besides you don’t know where to begin in your search. One chapter at a time appears the easiest method, boy. – Amorella

         1226 hours. Thanks for the help, Amorella. Later though, Carol is about to come down the stairs.

         The sarcasm is noted. – Amorella

         That’s how I feel; I’m not going to be sorry for it. I’m upset with me for not noticing all along.

         The theme word helps the reader. – Amorella

         No comment.

         Post. - Amorella


         1246 hours. Carol is checking the mail and in the meantime I came up with the theme words. Chapter theme word in bold.

         Good. Add and post the statistics. – Amorella

** **
Ch. 13 - Spice
Words. 3187         Words per Sentence 13.6
Sentences 230
Sentences/Paragraph 2.4
Passive Sentences 2.0 percent
Flesh Reading Ease 100
Flesh-Kincaid Grade Level 1.3

Ch. 14 - Continuity
Words. 3135          Words per Sentence 11.2          
Sentences 271
Sentences/Paragraph 2.3
Passive Sentences 3.0 percent
Flesh Reading Ease 100
Flesh-Kincaid Grade Level 0.5

Ch. 15 - Relations
Words. 3015         Words per Sentence 13.1
Sentences 224
Sentences/Paragraph 2.1
Passive Sentences 0 percent
Flesh Reading Ease 100
Flesh-Kincaid Grade Level 1.2

** **

         You had your Panera/Chipotle lunches and presently you are waiting for Carol who is picking up a last minute Valentine card for Kim and Paul. You hope to surprise Kim by including a copy of a Valentine poem you wrote for her when she was six years old. Below you were shocked to see how the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease formula is scored. – Amorella

** **
According to Wikipedia's entry on Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease, the reading ease is scored on a 0-100 scale and ". . . higher scores indicate material that is easier to read; lower numbers mark passages that are more difficult to read." The score is calculated using a formula you can find on Wikipedia (if you're interested). More helpful than the formula is this information about how to interpret scores:
90.0–100.0 -- easily understandable by an average 11-year-old student
60.0–70.0 -- easily understandable by 13- to 15-year-old students
0.0–30.0 -- best understood by university graduates

From Yahoo Best Answers which relates back to Wikipedia

** **

         1411 hours. I cannot believe in all these years that I never had the curiosity to look up the scoring. Somehow I got it into my mind early on that a 1 equaled a high school graduate. I always felt (in all my books) that I was writing for mostly a high school junior or senior College Prep, Honors or AP student since those are the people I taught for so many years. On the college side I added at least a college sophomore level as a general four-year mix – ages 16 through 20 year olds. Here I come to find out the 1 stands for best understood by university students (and graduates I assume).

         You have greater reading expectations. – Amorella

         The F-K score goes up to 30. I mean, give me a break.

         Add the formulas here to remind you of how it works.

** **

Flesch–Kincaid readability test

The Flesch/Flesch–Kincaid readability tests are designed to indicate test comprehension difficulty when reading a passage of contemporary academic English. There are two tests, the Flesch Reading Ease, and the Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level. Although they use the same core measures (word length and sentence length), they have different weighting factors, so the results of the two tests correlate approximately inversely: a text with a comparatively high score on the Reading Ease test should have a lower score on the Grade Level test. Both systems were devised by Rudolf Flesch.
History

"The Flesch–Kincaid" (F–K) Reading grade level was developed under contract to the United States Navy in 1975 by J. Peter Kincaid and his team. Other related US Navy research directed by Kincaid delved into high tech education (for example, the electronic authoring and delivery of technical information); usefulness of the Flesch–Kincaid readability formula; computer aids for editing tests; illustrated formats to teach procedures; and the Computer Readability Editing System (CRES).
The F-K formula was first used by the US Army for assessing the difficulty of technical manuals in 1978 and soon after became the Department of Defense military standard. The commonwealth of Pennsylvania was the first state in the US to require that automobile insurance policies be written at no higher than a ninth grade level of reading difficulty, as measured by the F-K formula. This is now a common requirement in many other states and for other legal documents such as insurance policies.
Flesch Reading Ease

In the Flesch Reading Ease test, higher scores indicate material that is easier to read; lower numbers mark passages that are more difficult to read. The formula for the Flesch Reading Ease Score (FRES) test is

206.835 – 1.015 (total words___) – 84.6 (total syllables)
                              (total sentences)                 (total words)


Scores can be interpreted as shown in the table below.
Reader’s Digest magazine has a readability index of about 65, Time magazine scores about 52, an average 6th grade student's (an 11-year-old) written assignment has a readability test of 60–70 (and a reading grade level of 6–7), and the Harvard Law Review has a general readability score in the low 30s. The highest (easiest) readability score possible is around 120 (e.g. every sentence consisting of only two one-syllable words). The score does not have a theoretical lower bound. It is possible to make the score as low as you want by including words with arbitrarily many syllables. This sentence, for example, taken as a reading passage unto itself, has a readability score of about 18.5. This paragraph has a readability score of 19.1. The sentence, "The Australian platypus is seemingly a hybrid of a mammal and reptilian creature" is a 24.4. This article has a readability score of around 42.0. One particularly long sentence about sharks in chapter 64 of Moby-Dick has a readability score of -146.77.
Many government agencies require documents or forms to meet specific readability levels.
The U.S. Department of Defense uses the Reading Ease test as the standard test of readability for its documents and forms. Florida requires that life insurance policies have a Flesch Reading Ease score of 45 or greater.
Use of this scale is so ubiquitous that it is bundled with popular word processing programs and services such as KWord, IBM Lotus Symphony, Microsoft Office Word, WordPerfect and WordPro.
Long words affect this score significantly more than they do the grade level score.

From Wikipedia
** **

         2118 hours. Leftovers for supper, and we watched “The Best of Jimmy Fallon”, “Downton Abbey” and NBC News. I have spent some time researching these readability tests and software. I think I have enough with MS Office. The key is readability ease, which is always 100 percent in the chapters.

         Good of you to come to that conclusion once again. These are not children’s books, boy. Tomorrow we work on Dead 16 and move right along through that chapter and the next two. I have been ‘listening’ to your mind about publication prospects. Direct yourself to discover more about the iBook process and keep an open mind for now. – Amorella

         I have been leaning Amazon because the market appears open to more people. Mostly I am thinking about who have access with more electronic ‘readers’. I have saved the money to self publish as I have done through iUniverse, Inc. I have put Diplomat in the backseat for the time being. I am working on ideas though.


         You don’t need to explain to me. I know exactly what you are thinking and the reasoning behind it. Tomorrow, dude. Post. - Amorella

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