I needed to know the word count of a story of mine today, so I consulted a site called Word Count Tools. No Word on my machine yet, so I’m making do with primitive word pad programs without automatic word-counting. WCT not only counts the words, but it assesses your writing in terms of “readability level.” I wondered what that meant, aside from a subjective impression you might get reading text. Helpfully, it says at the bottom that it calculates something called a Dale-Chall score.

“[The Dale-Chall] formula is used to assess the readability level of a given text, which is described below:

0.1579 (difficult words/words ) + 0.0496 (words/sentences )

Difficult words do not belong to the list of 3,000 familiar words. The formula adds 3.6365 to the raw score if the percentage of difficult words is greater than 5% to get the adjusted score.”

Sure. I see. Anyway, a score of 4.9 or lower (for example) is “easily understood by an average 4th-grade student or lower.” A score of 10 or more is “easily understood by an average college graduate.”

I couldn’t resist putting yesterday’s post through the count, just for fun. It’s 335 words, 1898 characters, with a readability level of “easily understood by a 11th-12th grade student.” The most used words are “time” and “clock,” four times each, then “yard” and “now,” three times each. Clearly, I was writing about time and space. There were 100 “difficult” words and 211 unique words, with 26 sentences of an average length of 12.9 words.

What about the Gettysburg Address? Famously, it’s short: 271 words, 1462 characters, “easily understood by a 9-10th grade student.” Its top word is “nation,” at five times, or fully 8.3 percent of the total. Other top words are “dedicated,” “great,” and “dead.” There are only 47 “difficult” words. Clearly a speech for the common man, or at least the 19th-century common man.