Insufficiently sesquipedalian? Or what?

[womzilla]

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[washa-way.livejournal.com]

I blame your use of concrete nouns.

[avram]

It may just mean you write clearly. Run-on sentences and obscurantism inflate reading level.

Here, running some bits of Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" through a text analyser. First, the passage from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

That has a Flesch-Kincaid grade level of 6.7. Now, Orwell's "modern English" version:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Aa Flesch-Kincaid grade level of 26.2. But does that make it better writing?

How about some Sarah Palin, from her interview with Time?

We have protected our state sovereignty by taking on the big oil industry interests, making sure that there is not going to be any undue influence on the oil industry, that our state administration and our state lawmakers will be making the decisions we will be making, based on sound, solid, unbiased information, not being corrupted by, in the case that I'm speaking of now, an oil service company's undue influence that has corrupted some lawmakers.

That tests out at 31.4!

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

But I write ludicrously long sentences, with parentheticals and digressions and self-referential asides, even when I'm not doing it consciously as I am now.

[avram]

14.4!