Glare report: 3/29/05. Not.

[pegkerr]

Zero words added. I didn't get to it until 9:45. I'm sorry, all I accomplished tonight was glaring, and fixing some minor formatting nitpicks. I don't know what the fish say in the Lake Nokomis scene, so I have to move on, pick what to write next.

Nothing springs to mind. I think I'm still struggling with a sleep deficit from Minicon, which doesn't help.

Tomorrow I'll try again.

At the suggestion of sleigh, I ran the grammar check in Word, which includes the Flesch-Kincaid grammar stats checker that's built into MS Word. sleigh had linked to a post of Toby Bucknell which examines the sophistication of language used in best-selling fiction. He reports a certain James V. Smith, Jr examined the works of best-selling authors using the Flesch-Kincaid grammar stats checker that's built into MS Word. Here's what Smith concluded:

The amount of passive voice the writers used ranged from 2.3% to 13.43%.

The number of characters per word ranged from 3.72 to 4.58.

The readability ranged from 72.34% to 91.84%, with an average of 83.1%.

Finally, on the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level scale, the range was 2.68 to 6.3, with an average grade level of 4.4.

I ran the stats on the ice palace novel so far (sixty-eight pages in manuscript, which I don't think is a very big sample yet):

Passive voice: 1%

Number of characters per word: 4.3.

Readability: 85.1%

Grade level: 3.7 (Argh. I'll fix that eventually, if nothing else.)

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_lotuseater/]

Have you read Anne Lamott's Bird By Bird? I'd definitely pick it up if you haven't - she talks very candidly about the writing process and all its horrible psychological effects, but manages to be really comforting and inspiring about it.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Yes, I have read it. Don't have a copy of it, though.

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't worry at all about the stats -- in fact, I'll be making a concerted effort never to look at mine (especially since I don't intend to write in Word anymore...). I don't think the F-K scale or Passive Voice percentage, or Number of Characters Per Word or Readibility Percentage has anything to do with the quality of the work.

All that matters is whether you think it's good. :-)

[callunav.livejournal.com]

ohhhhhhh....what are you writing in? I loathe Word. I'm a Mac person so I've been trying to content myself with AplleWorks but am coming reluctantly to the conclusion that it sucks. Do you have a third alternative that you like?

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

I can understand loathing Word; I've had a love/hate relationship with it for decades... :-)

I've been using Nisus Writer Express for the past year -- it's a full-featured, OS-X native application with a nice, uncluttered interface, and it's not as intrusive and bloated as Word. Its default save format is RTF, which damned near any text editor can read, though if you want you can save in DOC format. It can read Word files, as well. Check out http://www.nisus.com -- the program costs $60 as a download, and you can download a 30 day trial as well. I've written all of the current novel-in-progress in Nisus, and that's what I use on a daily basis now for word processing.

You might also look into Mellel, another full-featured OS-X word processor. I've played with that a bit as well; for awhile, I was bouncing back and forth between them until I finally decided that I preferred the interface of Nisus (and its RTF-native save). Mellel actually has more 'features' than Nisus, though they're ones I generally don't use. It can also read Word files (somewhat), and can export a document as a Word file, though it saves normally in its own proprietary format. Its real forte is being able to go left-to-right as some languages like Hebrew or Arabic do. Mellel is at http://www.mellel.com and runs $39.

Either of those two, for a fiction writer, would be a more-than-adequate substitute for Word, in my opinion.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, I loathe Word, too.

[(Anonymous)]

Try MacJournal, it helps organize things as well as let you write.

-Tobias S. Buckell

[callunav.livejournal.com]

I've been meaning to ask you this: when you talk about glare reports, is that you glaring at the computer/text? Or is it you getting the kind of glare off of it that causes headaches and brain-fry, like road glare only worse?

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Glaring at the computer/text. It's a term I picked up from pameladean ("I glared at my novel awhile tonight.")

[tinymich.livejournal.com]

Question: when you say you want to "fix" the grade level, do you mean you hope to raise it or lower it? And why do you feel you need to do so, whichever way?

The average grade levels of 4.4 and 3.7 sound pleasantly low to me. I can tell you that my papers (I write them all in word and have to wordcount all of them, so I always get the stats) ALL clock in at 12.0 grade level. Every single one. And I don't think that means they're well-written; I think that just makes them impenetrable overcomplicated academic papers. If I had to read that kind of writing for pleasure as fiction, I think I would shoot myself. (Or just not read.)

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

I do want to raise the grade level. 3.7 just seems too low to me, dammit.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

I have a feeling that pushing the grade level up will inevitably push the readability down. (As tinymich suggests.

[tinymich.livejournal.com]

yeah, what skylarker said. I think a grade level hovering around 4 makes the text nice and readable. IIRC the FK stats are merely a function of average sentence length and average number of syllables per word.

Hell, I'd take that stat as a *compliment* if I wuz you. ;-)

[huladavid.livejournal.com]

I don't know what the fish say in the Lake Nokomis scene

Maybe, but I have heard the owl call my name.

Are you unsure of what their message is, or what the wording is? (Does this make sense? Am I a fish?)

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

The message.

Uh-Oh

[scott-lynch.livejournal.com]

I ran the first quarter of my novel through this checker (thanks for the tip; I'd never have known about this otherwise), because I'm not running the full 800-odd pages through this afternoon. My results:

Average characters per word: 4.5

Passive sentences: 3%

Flesch Reading Ease: 73.5

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 6.5

Apparently, I'm a highfalutin' literary obscurantist. I hope my editor wasn't taking the piss when he said "We think it's literary, yet also quite commercial."