This is a wonderful little piece. It puts me in mind of all those “readibility formulas” we were taught as teachers.

Those studying the written word point out that there are various things that make text more difficult: things such as sentence length, the number of multisyllabic words used, the number of sentences per paragraph. They provide formulas to tell you exactly how difficult a piece of text is. You count the instances of “difficult” words, count the number of words in a sentence, etc. When you crunch the numbers, you arrive at some “grade level” of the material: 5th grade, 9th grade, 15th grade, whatever.

These hold up, more or less, as you apply them to various pieces of text: Faulkner really is more difficult to read than Hemingway. You do get some strange blips outside of the standardized range: Vonnegut, using simple words and simple sentence structures, comes in at a pretty low reading level, say 7th grade, but of course his writing is full of moral thought that is beyond a typical 7th grader. But of course you can’t easily quantify these qualities, so you do what all good scientists do: you ignore them. “Vonnegut? Isn’t he banned in many schools? We shouldn’t be using his stuff anyway. Not that I’ve read any myself, you understand.”

(I was once asked this question by a math education professor: “How can you analyze anything if you can’t quantify it?” It was a rhetorical question on her part; she “knew” that it was impossible. It’s striking that we can become so enmired in our own fields that we can’t think any more).

So, readability formulas are offered as a tool to prospective reading teachers. Blah blah blah. Okay. Another tool never hurts, even if it’s a tool for turning those star-headed screws that you have only one of in your house, and that in a place you can’t reach.

Of course, someone comes along and says, “Aha! Not only can I apply these reading formulas to extant text, I can write text to the forumula! Instant grade-leveled textbooks!”

That person, of course, is a moron. That person creates textbooks full of short, choppy, disjointed sentences, with all the “difficult” words (words that have the positive effect of actually describing a useful concept) removed. So we end up trying to teach kids with text that doesn’t flow, doesn’t contain much meaning, oversimplifies concepts to the point where they are unusable and sometimes plain wrong.

Scientism at its best!