The Academy’s Impact on My Desire to Be Read#
Does my writing change based on the audience I’m writing for? In this case, I was interested in whether my writing — as I suspected — became more “unreadable” if I was writing for school. My memoir writing for school has all been in pursuit of a high grade, but often I’ve also taken the pieces to a workshop where my classmates would be reading them, too.
Voyant uses the Coleman-Liau index to determine readability, or how well a text is understood, by taking into account the average number of letters per 100 words and sentences per 100 words. In general, a low readability score means a text is more readable, while a high score means a text is less readable. (There is so much more to the politics of readability indexes than I ever dreamed possible, but we’ll keep this relatively simple and stop there.)
Even though vocabulary density (the number of unique words divided by the number of total words) and words per sentence both count words and therefore contribute to the readability score, I wanted to separate those here for the purposes of, well, owning myself:
Audience |
Vocabulary Density (avg.) |
Words Per Sentence (avg.) |
Readability (avg.) |
|---|---|---|---|
Academic |
0.401 |
21.6 |
9.307 |
Wide |
0.428 |
19.7 |
7.949 |
In general, it looks like my memoir writing for a wide audience is more readable than my writing for an academic audience. (Higher vocabulary density and a lower readability score both indicate more readable text.) I’m not sure if vocabulary density or words per sentence are significant on their own, both because the corpus is pretty small and, more importantly, because I haven’t done the math to determine statistical significance in over a decade.
Questions/Thoughts for Further Study#
Does readability change based on topic?
What topics correlate to vocabulary density and words per sentence in particular? For instance, my recollection is that my “wide readership” writing can trend more poetic, which means longer sentences.