clever, or too clever by half?

Which are you? And how clever is not clever enough?

A few days ago a fascinating email landed in my inbox at work, linking to two websites for determining the readability of a text. Readability is expressed in terms of "grade level," meaning what grade in American school a person would have to be in to understand the text easily. There are different tests, using different criteria and giving the reader (or the US education system!) varying degrees of the benefit of the doubt: what comes up at a 10th grade reading level in one test might be 12th or even college (university) level in another.

But seriously, how do the scientists rate the pratfalls of our prose? The SMOG test - acronymically-enhanced "Simple Measure of Gobbledigook" - uses an equation thus:

The Flesch-Kincaid grade level formula looks like this:

and the wonderfully-named Gunning Fog Index (which presumably measures how "foggy" a piece of writing is) looks like this:

It is confusing, to this simple mind, that linguists and educationalists are using such crude measuring tools - as if word/sentence length were the only issue. I personally think you could do just as well with an inverse rating based on the number of prepositions. But maybe there is a wonderfully indicative simplicity at work here which is almost poetic in its very conception.

Critically, however, there doesn't seem to be any indication of how readable is "good" and how readable is "bad." I can see that each person, and even each text, will have its own needs and aims, so there can be no ideal target level. Readability is generally agreed to be a Good Thing, but the value attached to it is merely implicit in the fact that one is testing for it - a detail which leaves the famous barn door wide open for interpretation, and then neurosis, as follows.

After the rather salutary processing of several randomly selected work-generated text samples (score: a gratifying grade 13+, meaning we have something to aspire to), I couldn't resist trying out some selections of my own prose. I put in a section of a close reading of a poem by Joseph Brodsky. 9th grade. Yay! This is good news: even when talking about complex things I am clear, understandable by children! I put in a section of a review of Dorothy Molloy: 10th grade. Later I put in a whole load of samples from Baroque: they averaged 8th or 9th grade. I began, as I tested sample after sample, to feel piqued: what am I, stupid? What! Any child could understand my most interesting thoughts? What is this?

So then I put in a sample of my recent review of the geo-kinetic poet Frances Presley (soon to come out in Poetry London). It got a 14. Hurrah! You have to be in university to understand that one! See, if I put my mind to it I can be hard. I put in a sample of essay on Donaghy: 14. Wrong again, the master of clarity unclarified. Cope? 14! Oh NO! How could I not have written readably about Wendy Cope? I'm letting the side down badly. Duhig: 13. MacNeice: a high 13. All these years of saying I was a lowbrow - well, galling as it was to begin to suspect I might actually be one, imagine the disappointment of turning out finally to be no such of a thing.

With not much left to care about, I put in a sample from an essay on New Formalism, written as if its author thought Big Words sound more intelligent. I was mocking the essay slightly, earlier in the month. Well - it got a 16. Bits of it are only a 14.

I'm a wreck.