Home

Why lukeprog.com is Easy to Read

 

You visit this website for ideas, not fancy words. Fancy words make ideas less clear, so I avoid them.

“But don’t you want to appeal to educated people?”

Yes. That’s why I write simply. Nobody likes difficult reading, not even educated people.

“Isn’t America dumb enough already? You should be challenging people!”

America is dumb because it has dumb ideas, not because it uses short words instead of long ones. I write to spread good ideas and fight bad ones. I can do that best when people understand me.

But I don’t just try to write simply. I guarantee it. How? I use a readability formula.

Robert Gunning did years of research and came up with the Gunning fog index. I run the formula on my writing and it tells me how many years of school someone needs to understand me.

Every pageI don’t bother to measure the readability of pages that are mostly pictures. For example: 52 Influential Photographs and Favorite Extinct Animals. on this site scores lower than 10. Some score as low as 5. Remember: the lower the better. Here’s how my site compares in readability:

Green Eggs and Ham: 2.8
TV Guide: 6.0
Harry Potter: 7.6
lukeprog.com: 5.0–9.9
Wind in the Willows: 10.1
Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: 12.7
Newsweek: 14.0
Routledge History of Philosophy: 15.1
Internal Revenue Code: 22.1

Look at that! My site is easier to read than children’s classic Wind in the Willows. Often, it’s easier than Harry Potter.

I write simply even about complex topics, like philosophy. Philosophy isn’t hard, but reading philosophy is. I think more people should do philosophy, and they shouldn’t need to suffer through Heidegger and Derrida first.

Do you want to write simply, too? I hope so. But it can be hard work. You need to unlearn much of what your English teachers taught you. To start, read The Art of Plain Talk.

You can measure your own readability at EditCentral.