Friday, April 22, 2005
Shakespeare, Nietzxche, and the Fog Index
Our friend, Notre Dame philosophy professor, John O'Callaghan, writes:
"I am having too much fun avoiding work by playing with that readability page that you linked to. The contributors to the MOJ ought to pride themselves on the fact that Act 3, scene 1 of Hamlet, which contains the “To be or not to be” soliloquy comes out on the Gunning-Fog grade index at a fifth grade level, while on the Flesch-Kinkaid grade index it comes out at a second grade level. And on the Flesch reading ease scale, it comes out rather highly, scoring well above 70 at nearly 90; but if good writers are supposed to aim on that scale for a score between 60 and 70, I suppose we would have to grade old Shakespeare as a pretty simplistic writer. Thus the second graders can probably understand it, though they will find it perhaps a little too boring for their tastes. The first part of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, “On the Prejudices of the Philosophers,” on the other hand, puts all of you to shame as on the Gunning-Fog it comes out as about senior year in college, while on the Flesch-Kinkaid it comes out as senior year in high school. And on the readability scale it comes out at about 50, which tracks pretty well with my experience of trying to teach it. Seniors can understand it, though they find it pretty dense. More proof that good education should start kids on Shakespeare sometime before the age of 10, and wait until college to give them Nietzsche."
I wonder how his blog rates on these indices?
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2005/04/shakespeare_nie.html