A key to communicating effectively is to know your audience. In terms of written work you may hear of things like the Fleischman Kincaid system which rates text on a "grade level". In theory, the average seventh grader should be able to read and understand your work, in practice comprehension and coherent meaning often depends on subject matter as much as the words you choose.

For whatever they are worth, readability scores are at least helpful in determining the complexity of your vocabulary. For years, I've used the readability feature in Microsoft Word which seems to take into account grammar and sentence structure. It is by far not a hard fast rule for easy reading but I like to think that every little bit helps.

That is why today's Goof Off is the so-called "Blog Readability Test". At first glance, it does not seem to be as sophisticated as MS Word, but it's terribly convenient and only requires a destination URL before it does its magic. I can't agree with all of the determinations but it seems to have a general idea about reading level. As such, I'm proud to announce that even an elementary school kid can understand this blog, according to the test. Incidentally MS Word claims this entry is on a tenth grade level.