On Flesch-Kincaid Scores
(How is it that I never noticed the countdown on tack 2 of this disc?)
Anyhow....
Another dull Friday night.
Another day of failed purifications. At least I think I have my compound in there somewhere. I guess I'll try again tomorrow -- the first Saturday in like 4 months that I have not had something planned.
Anyway....
Just so I have something to post tonight, I might as well complain about something I posted in the early hours of today, my public journal's Flesch-Kincaid Score. I've never quite understood the logic behind this scoring system. Basically, it assumes that it takes more education to read longer sentences and longer syllabled words. I can buy the longer sentence bit, but longer words? Why the heck would more syllables have any relation whatsoever to the education required to understand something? It seems to me to be the opposite. Many polysyllabic words are simply compound words -- for example "polysyllabic" If you know what the one syllable prefix "poly-" means and the word "syllable" and the English noun-to-adjective inflection, sticking the two together is pretty obvious. No, the difficulty comes in knowing what "poly-" and "syllable" mean, and those are small words.
If you want complicated reading, let me show you the abstract of a science article:Resonance Raman (RR) evidence for structural linkage between the distal side of heme pocket and the signaling domain of an oxygen sensing hemoprotein, HemAT-Bs, is reported. The band-fitting analyses of the RR spectra in the Fe-O2 stretching (Fe-O2) region revealed the presence of three conformers with Fe-O2 at 554, 566, and 572 cm-1, which reflect different H-bond strengths on the bound O2 molecule. While recent X-ray analysis for CN--bound HemAT-Bs suggested the importance of Thr95 and Tyr70, the species with the strongest H-bond (554 cm-1) was deleted in the T95A mutant and also by removal of the linker and signal domains; however, the Y70F mutant maintained the same three conformers. A scheme for specific O2 sensing and signaling mechanism is discussed.
(Quoted from J. Am. Chem. Soc. (2004), 126(46), 15000-15001)
This is from the latest issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, lovingly known as JACS by us scientists, one of the most prestigious journals out there. Now the paragraph only contains 2 (3, if you pronounce "mechanism" as four syllables, but I doubt that the Flesch-Kincaid algorithm is smart enough for that) words of more than 3 syllables. One is a compound, "hemoprotein", so it might as well be considered two words. The short prefix is the part most people would not understand. I certainly hope you all know what a protein is -- at least vaguely. This leaves "analysis" as the only "big" word.
And the paragraph only has one sentence with more than two clauses -- and only if you count the semicolon as forcing the otherwise independent clauses to be one sentence.
I doubt this paragraph would receive a very high score. FK probably would predict a 7th-grade reading level.
I doubt any of you have any clue (excepting nonmdinmd) what the heck the paragraph is even talking about. (I only vaguely grasp their claim myself.)
As another example of how I don't understand the logic behind the FK assumption is my poem. In the first three stanzas, I use the words "minstrels," "bards," "befell," "ample," and "scythe." All of these are two syllables or less, yet none of them is used very frequently in modern English. How does KS account for this? I don't think it does.
Perhaps the score is meant to depict reading, not understanding. I still don't buy that. Above, "scythe" is not exactly phonetic.
Or perhaps I am just mad because my journal supposedly only requires a 7th-grade reading level....
Anyhow....
Another dull Friday night.
Another day of failed purifications. At least I think I have my compound in there somewhere. I guess I'll try again tomorrow -- the first Saturday in like 4 months that I have not had something planned.
Anyway....
Just so I have something to post tonight, I might as well complain about something I posted in the early hours of today, my public journal's Flesch-Kincaid Score. I've never quite understood the logic behind this scoring system. Basically, it assumes that it takes more education to read longer sentences and longer syllabled words. I can buy the longer sentence bit, but longer words? Why the heck would more syllables have any relation whatsoever to the education required to understand something? It seems to me to be the opposite. Many polysyllabic words are simply compound words -- for example "polysyllabic" If you know what the one syllable prefix "poly-" means and the word "syllable" and the English noun-to-adjective inflection, sticking the two together is pretty obvious. No, the difficulty comes in knowing what "poly-" and "syllable" mean, and those are small words.
If you want complicated reading, let me show you the abstract of a science article:Resonance Raman (RR) evidence for structural linkage between the distal side of heme pocket and the signaling domain of an oxygen sensing hemoprotein, HemAT-Bs, is reported. The band-fitting analyses of the RR spectra in the Fe-O2 stretching (Fe-O2) region revealed the presence of three conformers with Fe-O2 at 554, 566, and 572 cm-1, which reflect different H-bond strengths on the bound O2 molecule. While recent X-ray analysis for CN--bound HemAT-Bs suggested the importance of Thr95 and Tyr70, the species with the strongest H-bond (554 cm-1) was deleted in the T95A mutant and also by removal of the linker and signal domains; however, the Y70F mutant maintained the same three conformers. A scheme for specific O2 sensing and signaling mechanism is discussed.
(Quoted from J. Am. Chem. Soc. (2004), 126(46), 15000-15001)
This is from the latest issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, lovingly known as JACS by us scientists, one of the most prestigious journals out there. Now the paragraph only contains 2 (3, if you pronounce "mechanism" as four syllables, but I doubt that the Flesch-Kincaid algorithm is smart enough for that) words of more than 3 syllables. One is a compound, "hemoprotein", so it might as well be considered two words. The short prefix is the part most people would not understand. I certainly hope you all know what a protein is -- at least vaguely. This leaves "analysis" as the only "big" word.
And the paragraph only has one sentence with more than two clauses -- and only if you count the semicolon as forcing the otherwise independent clauses to be one sentence.
I doubt this paragraph would receive a very high score. FK probably would predict a 7th-grade reading level.
I doubt any of you have any clue (excepting nonmdinmd) what the heck the paragraph is even talking about. (I only vaguely grasp their claim myself.)
As another example of how I don't understand the logic behind the FK assumption is my poem. In the first three stanzas, I use the words "minstrels," "bards," "befell," "ample," and "scythe." All of these are two syllables or less, yet none of them is used very frequently in modern English. How does KS account for this? I don't think it does.
Perhaps the score is meant to depict reading, not understanding. I still don't buy that. Above, "scythe" is not exactly phonetic.
Or perhaps I am just mad because my journal supposedly only requires a 7th-grade reading level....