Tuesday, August 04, 2009
Clearing the Room
In his own inimitable way, Stephenesque provides timely and useful advice for everyday living. The tidbits are always blessed with a bite of ennui and a dash of
Here, he provides an excellent monologue to deliver in the conference room when folks are stuck in that moment where almost everything necessary to discuss has been discussed and the Sargasso Sea rolls in immobilizing all. How to get out of the tangle of boring patter. Mr. Fez shows the way. Bathroom humour on a higher level.
Here, he provides an excellent monologue to deliver in the conference room when folks are stuck in that moment where almost everything necessary to discuss has been discussed and the Sargasso Sea rolls in immobilizing all. How to get out of the tangle of boring patter. Mr. Fez shows the way. Bathroom humour on a higher level.
Labels: Educational, Effluvia
Monday, November 03, 2008
Adjectives & Mr. Chase Utley
I had an English teacher in high school we called Professor Tweed. He was a fastidious older gentleman who looked absolutely resplendent in tweed. Pants, kerchief, suit jacket, we even swore his clipped greyish mustache was woven of tweed as well. Having a bit of free time after retiring from professorial duties at Princeton and other colleges on the Ivy circuit, he signed up at our lucky high school to teach a few English lit courses. Those of us high on the self-delusion scale as regards our writing abilities were thrilled to have someone of such caliber at our small college prep school.
"Ha!," we crowed, "now, we’ll have someone on staff who would truly appreciate the pains of our craft." Well, we were half right for 95% of us. Professor Tweed was truly in pain with the majority of us, most probably wondering if some gastric pains had caused his mind to be hobbled enough when he decided to offer his services to our school. One of our classmates went on into the writing trade while another ended up at NPR where he's been writing and producing various shows of national note, including "This American Life". For the rest of us, having our scribblings evaluated by such a talented editor made for quick realizations that our future writing would be limited to the Great American Office Memo or The Employee Review:A One-on-One Study in the Modern Sado-Masochistic Relationship. Being young, coltish, and doltish, the pain to our souls was quick to hit and hurt and quick to depart. "Oh, well. There’s always (law/med/MBA) school…..where my writing may REALLY be appreciated.
One of the many remarkable qualities about Professor Tweed was his acerbic wit. As he handed out marked papers, he would drop a quick line or two at each desk, like a samurai delivering flicks of his sword down upon a loathsome enemy. We, like the on-charging victim would stand straight for a second or two, before collapsing in slices of ourselves at our desk. For most of us, it became an honor and a contest to receive the most withering of praises. Like true lunks, still deep within our inner inkwells, we still believed in our suspect writing talent. So, rather than taking Prof. Tweed's prickly advice, we entrenched in our faults, constructing bunkers that would have had doughboys' admiring glances.
I had a special arrow in his quiver, one he launched practically with each of my paper’s returns. "Mr. Deadwood, I presume, was his familiar greeting to me. I had, have, and will have a preternatural affection for adjectives. "The more the better", was my battle-cry. I was personally responsible for Prof. Tweed's racing through a box of red carbon pencils in my senior year. My papers were skyscrapers of descriptive additions. They were returned, marked down to a ranch house. He did admire the depth of my research and my footnotes; a ton of work in those days when the Internet was available for use to only the top levels of our armed forces. He was a Hemingway Man, with limited admiration for Charles Dickens, so I was the fully loaded sentence that need to be skinned. By the end of the year, my writing did weigh less, spurred on by the forced diet he had us on. My last gasp at my old self appeared on the final exam and he, true to form, red-inked out the battalion of adjectives I had marching to and fro in my submitted answers. In one particularly heavy and ponderously loaded sentence, he drew a sword and red-marked all of the adjectives, with the sword emerging form the red pile like Arthur’s sword. He loved King Arthur and spoke on occasion of how that era is the time he’d like to come back to. The red pitched battle on my paper was his final attempt at curing what he thought ailed me. A note at the end of the exam, "Mr. Deadwood, we have fought the gallant battle. I am withdrawing from this war.", brought tears to my eyes. My over-adjectivizing was more of an adversary than I’d thought.
So, whenever I read or wrote anything after high school, I did try to economize on the clothing I’d put my nouns in. Being neither a fan of Hemingway’s nor of Dickens’, but a grudging admirer of their talents and their works, I have tried to corral my inner adjective.
Sometimes, though, there’s nothing like the great use of an adjective.
Case in point.
Friday.
Citizen’s Bank Park.
Philadelphia.
Celebration for becoming baseball's world champions.
Chase Utley, the Phillie’s brilliant shortstop, rises from his seat. He is a notoriously soft-spoken guy who avoids journalists and interviewers as if they were low and away fastballs.
He steps up to the mike.
World Champions!", he yells to the adoring crowd.
Applause, of the polite quality ensues.
He steps back to the mike.
World F%$#*ing Champions !!!
Hysterical applause. Players and coaches behind Utley clutch their chests. Parents cover their children's ears (O.K., maybe not in Philly). Taxi-drivers listening on the radio in the city crash into light posts. Mounted Philly cops try to calm their steeds.
A legend is made.
T-shirt's coming outing shortly.
NSFW, but definitely funny.
"Ha!," we crowed, "now, we’ll have someone on staff who would truly appreciate the pains of our craft." Well, we were half right for 95% of us. Professor Tweed was truly in pain with the majority of us, most probably wondering if some gastric pains had caused his mind to be hobbled enough when he decided to offer his services to our school. One of our classmates went on into the writing trade while another ended up at NPR where he's been writing and producing various shows of national note, including "This American Life". For the rest of us, having our scribblings evaluated by such a talented editor made for quick realizations that our future writing would be limited to the Great American Office Memo or The Employee Review:A One-on-One Study in the Modern Sado-Masochistic Relationship. Being young, coltish, and doltish, the pain to our souls was quick to hit and hurt and quick to depart. "Oh, well. There’s always (law/med/MBA) school…..where my writing may REALLY be appreciated.
One of the many remarkable qualities about Professor Tweed was his acerbic wit. As he handed out marked papers, he would drop a quick line or two at each desk, like a samurai delivering flicks of his sword down upon a loathsome enemy. We, like the on-charging victim would stand straight for a second or two, before collapsing in slices of ourselves at our desk. For most of us, it became an honor and a contest to receive the most withering of praises. Like true lunks, still deep within our inner inkwells, we still believed in our suspect writing talent. So, rather than taking Prof. Tweed's prickly advice, we entrenched in our faults, constructing bunkers that would have had doughboys' admiring glances.
I had a special arrow in his quiver, one he launched practically with each of my paper’s returns. "Mr. Deadwood, I presume, was his familiar greeting to me. I had, have, and will have a preternatural affection for adjectives. "The more the better", was my battle-cry. I was personally responsible for Prof. Tweed's racing through a box of red carbon pencils in my senior year. My papers were skyscrapers of descriptive additions. They were returned, marked down to a ranch house. He did admire the depth of my research and my footnotes; a ton of work in those days when the Internet was available for use to only the top levels of our armed forces. He was a Hemingway Man, with limited admiration for Charles Dickens, so I was the fully loaded sentence that need to be skinned. By the end of the year, my writing did weigh less, spurred on by the forced diet he had us on. My last gasp at my old self appeared on the final exam and he, true to form, red-inked out the battalion of adjectives I had marching to and fro in my submitted answers. In one particularly heavy and ponderously loaded sentence, he drew a sword and red-marked all of the adjectives, with the sword emerging form the red pile like Arthur’s sword. He loved King Arthur and spoke on occasion of how that era is the time he’d like to come back to. The red pitched battle on my paper was his final attempt at curing what he thought ailed me. A note at the end of the exam, "Mr. Deadwood, we have fought the gallant battle. I am withdrawing from this war.", brought tears to my eyes. My over-adjectivizing was more of an adversary than I’d thought.
So, whenever I read or wrote anything after high school, I did try to economize on the clothing I’d put my nouns in. Being neither a fan of Hemingway’s nor of Dickens’, but a grudging admirer of their talents and their works, I have tried to corral my inner adjective.
Sometimes, though, there’s nothing like the great use of an adjective.
Case in point.
Friday.
Citizen’s Bank Park.
Philadelphia.
Celebration for becoming baseball's world champions.
Chase Utley, the Phillie’s brilliant shortstop, rises from his seat. He is a notoriously soft-spoken guy who avoids journalists and interviewers as if they were low and away fastballs.
He steps up to the mike.
World Champions!", he yells to the adoring crowd.
Applause, of the polite quality ensues.
He steps back to the mike.
World F%$#*ing Champions !!!
Hysterical applause. Players and coaches behind Utley clutch their chests. Parents cover their children's ears (O.K., maybe not in Philly). Taxi-drivers listening on the radio in the city crash into light posts. Mounted Philly cops try to calm their steeds.
A legend is made.
T-shirt's coming outing shortly.
NSFW, but definitely funny.
Labels: Educational, Effluvia, Philly
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
The Ears Have It
In this Sunday's NYT Magazine, an article caught my ear. Anthony Tommasini wrote in Hard to Be an Audiophile in an iPod World, what I've been thinking since first delving into music done the iPod way. "Music has become portable, wearable. The reproduced sound, if not rich and deep, is clear and lively. That’s good enough. Recorded sound as a re-creation of reality has almost been dropped. In the article, Mark Katz, an assistant professor of music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of "Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music", published by the University of California Press in 2004 points out that ads today for MP3s and iPods seldom make claims for the beauty of the sound. Instead typical ads depict stylish people with iPods as accessories to clothing, clipped on jeans, belts and shirts"I'll leave the "music as a fashion statement" argument for someone else. It's the sound quality issue that drew me into the article. First let me note one warning that Mr. Tomassini posted before he launched into the somewhat (not thoroughly) lousy sound quality of the iPod/MP3 vehicle. "Any discussion of recording technology has to note one intriguing quirk in the story: Few musicians have been audiophiles. More than the average music-loving amateur, working musicians understand the big gap between recorded music and the real thing. They can listen through the inadequacies of any recording and focus on what they want to hear."
The gist of the article is that convenience is king and that the quantity v. quality battle over sound quality has been won by the quantity side, headed by the iPod/MP3 proponents. Where does that leave the rest of us trilobytes?
Well, for one thing we can proudly say that we are not nuts and that, yes, the sound quality is a step down when you seriously downsize sound-reproducing equipment. So, a Bronx cheer in the general direction of all those iPoders who have given you hell regarding the state of your hearing.
On the other hand, since this shrinking clan of trilobytes is getting ever-smaller, it is best to lay low as it's not politically correct or personally self-protective to tell the iPoders that their perceptive qualities are going downhill. Like all things human, the cycle will come around and someday soon vast arrays of large sound-producing boxes will be in our homes again.
Labels: Educational, Effluvia, Idiosyncracies, NaBloPoMo
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Variable Costing
A bunch of us at work were at a meeting where we were introduced to the Evil World of Variable (or Marginal Cost) Pricing. The initial shock of listening to this topic as expounded by a company accountant (Gwynne!?!? How do you deal with this stuff on a daily basis?) did not result in deep hibernation as expected (shock, accountant, hibernation usually are not words one usually associated to be found in one sentence). The bean counter (Yes, I know that it’s an irritating descriptive to be hung with) had come up with a subtle plan on presenting his topic.
Radiohead. Well, Radiohead and their latest album release payment policy. Those of us musically inclined lent him our ears.
"In Rainbows" is, as most every music fan and Wall Street Journal reader out there knows, is being sold as a You Determine the Price release. At Radiohead.com, you go to the DOWNLOAD option and put in the price you’re willing to pay. $0.00 is allowable, as is $100.00. I didn’t try $1 million, in case my finger slipped and locked in the order. Negative amounts are not accepted; come on people, Radiohead is not going to pay you to be listening to their music.
The accountant started off by complementing the band on the size of their financial cojones as they were taking a shaky bet on the behavior of the human animal. Note Bene: I use cojones here in complete comfort since a former Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, deemed it possible to be speaking in public of such anatomical admiration. He noted that the bandied around term of Variable Pricing in regards to the album purchase was basically incorrect. At the least, it was misleading. While different sources out there (reliability is not being discussed here) provide definitions more fitting for the term Bid Pricing, our plucky accountant noted that most of these definitions miss out on the most important component. The cost. From there, he wended his way through the archaicity of accounting terms such as contribution margin costing, marginal value costing until he arrived at the door leading to Evil World of Variable (or Marginal Cost) Pricing.
This world sounded way too much like that physics world of Zeno’s Paradox, a place (and time) I was not interested in revisiting. Zeno’s Paradox was the nail-in-the-coffin for my career path in Physics, a very short career path, I'll add. According to that ingenious juggler Zeno of Elea, you cover half the distance between two points, over and over again, but you never get to that last point because the halving of the distance always gives you another distance to halve. Funny how my Physics teacher in high school was not able to explain how I was able to walk out of that class if I was continually covering half of the distance from my chair to the door.
Much the same with the Evil World of Variable Costing. A good or service is composed of 2 costs, fixed and variable. Whether we sell zero or a million of these goods or services, we have a fixed cost, say like rent, coffee, or Twinkies that we have to pay for. If we sell everything based on our Variable Cost, we are not paying for our rent, coffee, or those darn fattening Twinkies. We’d be selling ourselves into bankruptcy. And yet, as the accountant nudge-nudge-wink-winked, some companies’ purposely did this to maximize their sales. Not us, as our future seems quite bright, but some folks out there are unknowingly operating under Zeno’s Paradox of Accounting. (Gwynne? Ever come across this?)
Tying it all up, our accountant admitted that he was left paff as to how the financial folks involved with Radiohead came up with their "You Set the Price" scheme as cost of any sort never seemed to enter the calculation. He thought that at least a minimum price needed to be set. This faith in the Common Man that Radiohead seemed to be espousing was not in his Accounting Bible.
An interesting "What If?" music commentary on variable pricing is here. Economic Theory meets the Wallet of Reality.
Radiohead. Well, Radiohead and their latest album release payment policy. Those of us musically inclined lent him our ears.
"In Rainbows" is, as most every music fan and Wall Street Journal reader out there knows, is being sold as a You Determine the Price release. At Radiohead.com, you go to the DOWNLOAD option and put in the price you’re willing to pay. $0.00 is allowable, as is $100.00. I didn’t try $1 million, in case my finger slipped and locked in the order. Negative amounts are not accepted; come on people, Radiohead is not going to pay you to be listening to their music.
The accountant started off by complementing the band on the size of their financial cojones as they were taking a shaky bet on the behavior of the human animal. Note Bene: I use cojones here in complete comfort since a former Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, deemed it possible to be speaking in public of such anatomical admiration. He noted that the bandied around term of Variable Pricing in regards to the album purchase was basically incorrect. At the least, it was misleading. While different sources out there (reliability is not being discussed here) provide definitions more fitting for the term Bid Pricing, our plucky accountant noted that most of these definitions miss out on the most important component. The cost. From there, he wended his way through the archaicity of accounting terms such as contribution margin costing, marginal value costing until he arrived at the door leading to Evil World of Variable (or Marginal Cost) Pricing.
This world sounded way too much like that physics world of Zeno’s Paradox, a place (and time) I was not interested in revisiting. Zeno’s Paradox was the nail-in-the-coffin for my career path in Physics, a very short career path, I'll add. According to that ingenious juggler Zeno of Elea, you cover half the distance between two points, over and over again, but you never get to that last point because the halving of the distance always gives you another distance to halve. Funny how my Physics teacher in high school was not able to explain how I was able to walk out of that class if I was continually covering half of the distance from my chair to the door.
Much the same with the Evil World of Variable Costing. A good or service is composed of 2 costs, fixed and variable. Whether we sell zero or a million of these goods or services, we have a fixed cost, say like rent, coffee, or Twinkies that we have to pay for. If we sell everything based on our Variable Cost, we are not paying for our rent, coffee, or those darn fattening Twinkies. We’d be selling ourselves into bankruptcy. And yet, as the accountant nudge-nudge-wink-winked, some companies’ purposely did this to maximize their sales. Not us, as our future seems quite bright, but some folks out there are unknowingly operating under Zeno’s Paradox of Accounting. (Gwynne? Ever come across this?)
Tying it all up, our accountant admitted that he was left paff as to how the financial folks involved with Radiohead came up with their "You Set the Price" scheme as cost of any sort never seemed to enter the calculation. He thought that at least a minimum price needed to be set. This faith in the Common Man that Radiohead seemed to be espousing was not in his Accounting Bible.
An interesting "What If?" music commentary on variable pricing is here. Economic Theory meets the Wallet of Reality.
Labels: Educational, Effluvia, Quirks
Friday, March 30, 2007
Childish Pet Tricks
All of a previous week, my Ever-Loving Spouse, as well as her students, had to bear the brunt of statewide standardized testing. I wish I could blame the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and his “No Child Left Behind” approach to education policy for this hellish experience, but these damn things were around even when I was in the clutches of Sister Mary Ignatius Riley and her Rowdy Nunnery Band back in the drained swamps of Jersey.
Aside from being (my prejudices wide-opened here) an excellent and caring teacher, the Ever-Loving Spouse is the most elocutive of story-tellers. I wish I could re-tell, as best possible as I’d be able to, some of her school-related stories but that would count as stealing tales so I’ll leave the gems un-told and hope that she finally folds and either starts her own blog or, at the very least, pens them down for posterity. She possesses a clever eye, a sly wit, and a most uproarious laugh; all the necessary components for drawing one in for a long sit-down of enjoyable observations of the human condition...the very young human condition, which to me is the best possible condition to observe and discuss as it’s less burdened with the ineffective and distorting shield of age and adulthood.
Suffice it to say, each year’s renderings of these annual tests brings back memories of the Days of Testing of Yore. Sister Mary Ignatius Riley was a taskmaster of diocesean fame. She had her own line of palm switches which made her a tidy profit by way of selling them to other teachers in the various parishes around us. We, as kids, were clueless that encouragement via application of these switches to our open palms or backs was illegal. Most of our parents stood firmly in line with the quick-wristed Sister, assenting, at least tacitly, to this policy. I’m assuming that since most of the kids and their parents (I’m including myself in this bunch) were off-the-boat types who were used to this type of “physical” relationship between Learning, The Child, & The Teacher from their own experiences in the proverbial Old Country, never considered protesting as a valid option. You shrugged your shoulders and persevered. Moving forward and upward were the principal directions and if a swat or two assured keeping on the righteous path...well, no skin off of their backs, so to speak. It's a peculiar state of sorts that the educative process of childhood, wrapped in the black robe of nuns and tied with palm switches, which evoked so much fear back then could provide so much humour now. It's a Three Stooges effect. While it seemed (and felt) as if pain was intricately laced with the acquisition of knowledge at that time, I can't recall the sting. Is it because I can't seperate the two? Does this explain that behaviour in college where I'd gently lash my back while cramming the square peg of Calculus into the round hole in my head? Or is it simply that some information collection truly is mentally painful and the unity of bodily pain and mental pain gets us through that acquisition process?
This brings me back around to the annual standardized testing, specifically those parts of the test where a student is required to read 3-4 paragraphs and then answer questions. Oh, the pain these portions caused until the student figured out to read the questions first and then sift through the morass of the verbiage seeking answers. Who wrote these passages? They could not have been writers. Why were the passages so deathly boring? Were these portions of the test aimed to blot out the last mote of the desire to read in the test-takers? Did any other portion of these standardized test, extending to SAT's and GRE's, elicit as much deep sighing that reverberated through the silent classrooms as the read-em-'n-weep sections?
Perhaps a thin rope or heavy scarf would help. Slogging through the verbal detritus of these paragraphs, a student could gently flog themselves through their completion, feeling a slight nervy pain as their minds clogged with the thick sentences sluggishly sliding before their eyes. Like a dog being tought to sit, a child could be tricked into the temporary condition of complete, though low-level, pain. Anything to get through this day of testing.
Sit, boy. Sit.
Aside from being (my prejudices wide-opened here) an excellent and caring teacher, the Ever-Loving Spouse is the most elocutive of story-tellers. I wish I could re-tell, as best possible as I’d be able to, some of her school-related stories but that would count as stealing tales so I’ll leave the gems un-told and hope that she finally folds and either starts her own blog or, at the very least, pens them down for posterity. She possesses a clever eye, a sly wit, and a most uproarious laugh; all the necessary components for drawing one in for a long sit-down of enjoyable observations of the human condition...the very young human condition, which to me is the best possible condition to observe and discuss as it’s less burdened with the ineffective and distorting shield of age and adulthood.
Suffice it to say, each year’s renderings of these annual tests brings back memories of the Days of Testing of Yore. Sister Mary Ignatius Riley was a taskmaster of diocesean fame. She had her own line of palm switches which made her a tidy profit by way of selling them to other teachers in the various parishes around us. We, as kids, were clueless that encouragement via application of these switches to our open palms or backs was illegal. Most of our parents stood firmly in line with the quick-wristed Sister, assenting, at least tacitly, to this policy. I’m assuming that since most of the kids and their parents (I’m including myself in this bunch) were off-the-boat types who were used to this type of “physical” relationship between Learning, The Child, & The Teacher from their own experiences in the proverbial Old Country, never considered protesting as a valid option. You shrugged your shoulders and persevered. Moving forward and upward were the principal directions and if a swat or two assured keeping on the righteous path...well, no skin off of their backs, so to speak. It's a peculiar state of sorts that the educative process of childhood, wrapped in the black robe of nuns and tied with palm switches, which evoked so much fear back then could provide so much humour now. It's a Three Stooges effect. While it seemed (and felt) as if pain was intricately laced with the acquisition of knowledge at that time, I can't recall the sting. Is it because I can't seperate the two? Does this explain that behaviour in college where I'd gently lash my back while cramming the square peg of Calculus into the round hole in my head? Or is it simply that some information collection truly is mentally painful and the unity of bodily pain and mental pain gets us through that acquisition process?
This brings me back around to the annual standardized testing, specifically those parts of the test where a student is required to read 3-4 paragraphs and then answer questions. Oh, the pain these portions caused until the student figured out to read the questions first and then sift through the morass of the verbiage seeking answers. Who wrote these passages? They could not have been writers. Why were the passages so deathly boring? Were these portions of the test aimed to blot out the last mote of the desire to read in the test-takers? Did any other portion of these standardized test, extending to SAT's and GRE's, elicit as much deep sighing that reverberated through the silent classrooms as the read-em-'n-weep sections?
Perhaps a thin rope or heavy scarf would help. Slogging through the verbal detritus of these paragraphs, a student could gently flog themselves through their completion, feeling a slight nervy pain as their minds clogged with the thick sentences sluggishly sliding before their eyes. Like a dog being tought to sit, a child could be tricked into the temporary condition of complete, though low-level, pain. Anything to get through this day of testing.
Sit, boy. Sit.
Labels: Educational
Monday, December 04, 2006
A Dollop of Self-Delusion, if You Please
From the ever-entertaining and the brain-in-full-tilt-boogie Hillbilly, Please comes this link of statistical depression. How's it work? Well, you simply put your blog URL in the space indicated, press the Calc key and...Voila (or Eureka! or What the Hell? or whatever your favorite exclamation of surprise/disgust/ relief is).
You have your answer. An (allegedly) scientific calculation of your blog's readability. The key number, per Jagosaurus is the....
Gunning-Fog Index, which is calculated as per the following algorithm listed to determine the Gunning-Fog index.
* Calculate the average number of words you use per sentence.
* Calculate the percentage of difficult words in the sample (words with three or more syllables).
* Add the totals together, and multiply the sum by 0.4.
* Algorithm: (average_words_sentence + number_words_three_syllables_plus) * 0.4
The result is your Gunning-Fog index, which is a rough measure of how many years of schooling it would take someone to understand the content. The lower the number, the more understandable the content will be to your visitors. Results over seventeen are reported as seventeen, where seventeen is considered post-graduate level.
You can input your own blog or others', if you really want to get into depressing waters.
Herewith, current Gunning-Fog Index values of some of the blogs that are listed on this blog for you to go to visit.
Yours Truly 8.89 (i.e., barely out of high school? You'll do fine here!)
Easily Distracted 11.82 (History Prof from Swarthmore, wouldn't you know...)
Mortimer Shy 10.61 (This score told me that this test is whacked. If you read this blog, I'd say a 15 or 17 score would be minimal)
Outer Life 10.57
Searchie 11.31
Lilek's Bleats 9.18
2 Blowhards 10.14
Dooney's Cafe 11.17
About Last Night 9.56
This Blog Will be Deleted by Tomorrow 9.51
Andrew Sullivan 9.47
Online Photogrpaher 10.35
Maud Newton 11.27
Bookslut 8.78 (A book review/info site. Again, a surprise. Should've been higher)
The Elegant Variation 11.18 (A book review/info site.)
Now, in true self-delusional mode, what would be intreresting is to take these Gunning-Fog Indices and compare them with the worth of your blog and come up with a ratio of dollars to sense. That would be a useful exercise.....which I won't go on about as the results for yours truly don't really nurture my soul. What may need to happen is the arbitrary insertion of fundamentally inconsequential and frivolous long-syllabled words without any concern for comprehension of one's message. Communication on a higher plane, as it were, without a possibility of understanding.
So, Gunning Fog Index, take this!
"Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!"
I can always hope that the Gunning-Fog Index takes into account the witty and prosaic comments left on my blog entries for calcualtion purposes. Just riding on someone's coattails...
You have your answer. An (allegedly) scientific calculation of your blog's readability. The key number, per Jagosaurus is the....
Gunning-Fog Index, which is calculated as per the following algorithm listed to determine the Gunning-Fog index.
* Calculate the average number of words you use per sentence.
* Calculate the percentage of difficult words in the sample (words with three or more syllables).
* Add the totals together, and multiply the sum by 0.4.
* Algorithm: (average_words_sentence + number_words_three_syllables_plus) * 0.4
The result is your Gunning-Fog index, which is a rough measure of how many years of schooling it would take someone to understand the content. The lower the number, the more understandable the content will be to your visitors. Results over seventeen are reported as seventeen, where seventeen is considered post-graduate level.
You can input your own blog or others', if you really want to get into depressing waters.
Herewith, current Gunning-Fog Index values of some of the blogs that are listed on this blog for you to go to visit.
Yours Truly 8.89 (i.e., barely out of high school? You'll do fine here!)
Easily Distracted 11.82 (History Prof from Swarthmore, wouldn't you know...)
Mortimer Shy 10.61 (This score told me that this test is whacked. If you read this blog, I'd say a 15 or 17 score would be minimal)
Outer Life 10.57
Searchie 11.31
Lilek's Bleats 9.18
2 Blowhards 10.14
Dooney's Cafe 11.17
About Last Night 9.56
This Blog Will be Deleted by Tomorrow 9.51
Andrew Sullivan 9.47
Online Photogrpaher 10.35
Maud Newton 11.27
Bookslut 8.78 (A book review/info site. Again, a surprise. Should've been higher)
The Elegant Variation 11.18 (A book review/info site.)
Now, in true self-delusional mode, what would be intreresting is to take these Gunning-Fog Indices and compare them with the worth of your blog and come up with a ratio of dollars to sense. That would be a useful exercise.....which I won't go on about as the results for yours truly don't really nurture my soul. What may need to happen is the arbitrary insertion of fundamentally inconsequential and frivolous long-syllabled words without any concern for comprehension of one's message. Communication on a higher plane, as it were, without a possibility of understanding.
So, Gunning Fog Index, take this!
"Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!"
I can always hope that the Gunning-Fog Index takes into account the witty and prosaic comments left on my blog entries for calcualtion purposes. Just riding on someone's coattails...
Labels: Educational
