Jim Carson

Ben was fiddling with his site and added the wordstats plugin (now removed because it's slow). Just for humor's sake, I made a separate page because I was curious about my word patterns. As of 9:00 a.m. this morning (drumroll):

370,870	characters
95,296	syllables
8,997	unique words
61,019	words (1 out of every 7 is unique?!?))
1	occurence of "craptastic"
3,837	sentences
1,441	paragraphs
15.902788636956	average words per sentence (Gotta love the "precision" ...)
1.56	average syllables per word
12.2	"Fog" readability index
63.57	"Flesch" readability
9.0	"Kincaid" reability
1.4142	Square root of two

Comments:

1. The plugin doesn't differentiate among varous roots. Thus ride (77), riding (26), and rides (25) are shown separately. Added together, they would place in the top 75. There are are a lot of other examples.
2. The distribution of words is a bit disappointing, though probably normal. My top five words are common things like: the (3,335 times), a (1,710 times), to (1,656), and (1,381), and (there it is again -- drat) I (1,348).
   
3. My top five "big words," defined by Ben as ten or more characters: interesting (43), information (39), temperature(s) (33), unfortunately (15), and opportunity (14). This clearly reflects my obsession with weather.
4. Just for fun, I may modify the plugin to count the distribution of letters. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. `1234567890-=~!@#$%^&*()_+{}[]:";'><?,./
   
   Okay, not really. The page with the plugin has been disabled for the time being because the plugin isn't particularly insightful and I don't want to slow my site down any more than it already is.

Because I want to get past the 9,000 mark on unique words, I will note that I had tuna (8,998) and sliced avocado (8,999) on foccacia (9,000) for brunch (9,001).

Okay, enough of this, time to rip it out...

Here's some information on the indices, excerpted from the plugin's README file:

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The Fog index: Developed by Robert Gunning, is a well known and simple formula for measuring readability. The index indicates the number of years of formal education a reader of average intelligence would need to read the text once and understand that piece of writing with its word sentence workload.

18 unreadable
14 difficult
12 ideal
10 acceptable
8 childish

The Flesch index: This score rates text on a 100 point scale. The higher the score, the easier it is to understand the text. A score of 60 to 70 is considered to be optimal.

206.835 - (1.015 * words_per_sentence) - (84.6 * syllables_per_word)

(Yeah, but where does velocity factor in???)
The Kincaid index:This score rates text on U.S. grade school level. So a score of 8.0 means that the document can be understood by an eighth grader. A score of 7.0 to 8.0 is considered to be optimal.

(11.8 * syllables_per_word) + (0.39 * words_per_sentence) - 15.59;