How readable is your blog? A quantitative assessment of science blog accessibility

Editor’s Note: Over the weekend Colin Schultz started a great discussion on his blog about the reading level of science blogs. He has graciously offered to share his thoughts on Science of Blogging. Also, just in case you were wondering, you can also check the readability of your blog by heading over to Google and typing in “site:YourBlog.com” and clicking on the Advanced Search link, right below the regular “Search” button. From the options under the heading “Reading Level”, select “annotate results with reading level” and presto! You have yourself an assessment of the reading level of your particular blog. And now here’s Colin.

What grade are you in?

If you’re an adult, that’s probably not a question you’ve had to think about in a while. According to the pieces of paper on my wall, I’m in 17^th grade. If you have a PhD, you’re a bit higher. If you never had an opportunity at post-secondary education, then you’re in 12^th grade, or lower still if you didn’t complete highschool. Your level of education isn’t a perfect measure of your reading ability, but it is a decent estimate.

[Ed: This is frightening, but I (Peter) have technically completed a total of 23 grades: high-school until grade 13 (old Ontario system), plus 4 undergrad, 2 MSc and 4 PhD.]

Now, let’s say that two weeks ago you got wrapped up in the excitement about the discovery of a bacteria that can supposedly use arsenic in its DNA. It was intriguing, everyone seemed to be really excited about it, and you wanted to know more.

So, where could you turn?

If you sometimes go by Dr., you probably had a decent chance at working your way through the original study. If you are early in your university career, Ed Yong had you covered. If you are still in highschool, and you wanted to know what other scientists thought of the research, then Carl Zimmer had a story just for you.

These suggestions aren’t based on the level of technical depth or the amount of detail in the science, but are instead based on the different stories’ estimated reading levels. One of the most common assessments of reading level (and the one that comes bundled with Microsoft Word) is the Flesch-Kincaid readability test. Using the number of syllables, words and sentences in a piece of writing, the test spits out the school grade for which the writing is best suited.

Newspapers, which try to make their writing as accessible as possible, often try to keep their reading level at or below that expected of a high-schooler. Improving readability makes it easier for people to understand the point, and will probably improve the odds of keeping the reader around all the way to the end of an article. Much like writing that over-uses jargon, if readers have to work to get through a piece of writing, they will probably just tune out.

Now, I’m not sure exactly how they do it (and it may not be perfect*), but Google has started letting you filter your searches by readability. The results aren’t as detailed as the Flesch-Kincaid test. Rather, a site’s content is split into three buckets: basic, intermediate, or advanced.

A goal of many science bloggers is, much like newspapers, to communicate their information to people who are interested, but lack any background knowledge or experience. Improving readability, then, will at least in theory mean their content is more accessible. Obviously there is more to communicating science than syllable, word, and sentence ratios, but it’s interesting to come across some numbers that can be used to start comparing blog quality in addition to quantity.

The Top Five Most Readable Science Bloggers

**Where Readability = [ (1 x Basic score) + (2 x Intermediate) + (3 x Advanced) ] / 100

I’ve collected the readability scores from 80 science bloggers in a handy little spreadsheet. The blogs I looked at were those from the AGU, PloS, Wired***, Discover, Guardian, and Scientopia blog networks. I also selected a handful of ScienceBlogs and Independent bloggers, picking those who showed up on the Science 3.0 most prolific blogger list, or were assessed in some previous research on science bloggers (which I wrote about here.)

The readability scores for all of the bloggers fall between one, where all of the posts are Basic, and 3, where the writing is all considered Advanced. I also calculated network averages, which tend to cluster right around the middle. The differences were really quite small, with a spread of 1.80 to 2.06. The most readable blog network was ScienceBlogs, followed by the Guardian, AGU, Discover, Wired, Scientopia, and PloS.

It’s important to remember that this is just a readability calculation, and it doesn’t necessarily mean the writing is more informative or interesting. But, it’s important for writers to knock down as many barriers as they can between their ideas and the audience.

One of the most important things I learned in journalism school was to shed the convoluted writing style I picked up writing essays in university. We were taught to write in a straight line. Subject verb object. Repeat. The content and technical depth in two stories can be identical, but if you present it in a way that is easier to read, your information will reach more eyes.

Possible issues with using Google’s readability measurements:

1. ***Some sites may not have been properly assessed by Google, and will give skewed readings. I’m pretty sure something funny was going on with the Wired network results. Each of the bloggers’ posts were found to be in one category, rather than being spread out across the three levels of readability. I left the results in the spreadsheet, but I don’t know how much I trust them.
2. Some bloggers have a lot of throw-away posts, where they write two or three sentences and link to an outside source or post a video. These sorts of posts might push their blogs heavily towards the Basic bucket. Similarly, science bloggers who quote big chunks of scientific studies might get pushed towards Advanced.
3. Comments might get included in Google’s readability assessment, which doesn’t reflect the blogger’s writing style.

Colin Schultz is a Canadian journalist who happens to blog about science and science communication theory in his spare time. He is also active on twitter. The above post originally appeared on Colin’s blog.