Readability in Fanfiction

[Polipuff]

I analyzed the reading ease of 25 award-winning fics. Here’s what I found:

Fics included:
A Leash of Foxes - Cutlerine
Anima Ex Machina: REBOOT - JX Valentine
Anima Ex Machina - JX Valentine
Communication - Sike Saner
Crack'd, or How the Love of Seafood Saved Unova - Cutlerine
Electric Sheep - JX Valentine
Fledglings - Spiteful Murkrow
Flying in the Dark (revised) - diamondpearl876
Hoenn League: A Brendan and May Adventure - Breezy
Lost Evolution - elyvorg
Lull - Breezy
Morphic - Dragonfree
Operation GEAR: The Angel of Reckoning - The Great Butler
Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Overthrown - Knightfall
Pokémon Ranger and the Gardener of Gratitude - The Great Butler
Requiem - Sidewinder
Roots - Mrs. Lovett
Salvage - Negrek
Survival Project - diamondpearl876
The Harvarsaga - Firebrand
The Human Species - ShadedSkies
The Legendarian Chronicles Revision 11 - Chibi Pika
The Retelling of Pokémon Colosseum - bobandbill
The Thinking Man's Guide to Destroying the World - Cutlerine
Time and Time - Cutlerine

Notes: I kind of feel like I’m cheating by including Anima Ex Machina and the reboot, but whatever. Also, to keep this relevant, I only used fairly recent fics. This is NOT a collection of the 25 best fics; it is just merely a sample of great fics. This is also NOT a ranking system, it is organized alphabetically. Also, I ONLY ANALYZED THE FIRST CHAPTER, due to time constraints.

Number of Appearances:
Cutlerine: 4
JX Valentine: 3
The Great Butler: 2
diamondpearl876: 2
Breezy: 2
Everyone Else: 1

Flesch-Kincaid
The Flesch-Kincaid Test was designed to ease the difficulty of technical manuals in the army, before transitioning to a more general readability test. Higher Number = Easier Fic. At thirty, it is about as hard as Harvard Law Review. A little easier at sixty, that’s as easy as the BBC News Website. At eighty, it is around the level of Harry Potter. No seriously, try reading Harvard Law Review.

0-30: College Graduate
30-50: College Student
50-60: 10th to 12th Grade
60-70: 8th to 9th Grade
70-80: 7th Grade
80-90: 6th Grade
90-100: 5th Grade

The majority of fics were somewhere between the late sixties and early eighties. However, I did notice that the ‘younger’ the fic is, the harder it is usually. Maybe this is due to a changing demographic?

Mean: 78.14
Median: 78.1
Mode: 84, 73.8 (Useless though)
Hardest Fic According to Flesch-Kincaid: Requiem - Sidewinder (68.8)
Easiest Fic According to Flesch-Kincaid: Lull - Breezy (85.9)


All in all, I guess try to make your fic around the 70s.

Gunning-Fog
i’m not done yet! I put extra effort, so I included the Gunning-Fog Grade Level as well. It’s pretty simple; the number is the grade level of your fic. Higher Number = Harder Fic.

6: Sixth Grade
7: Seventh Grade
8: Eighth Grade
9: Ninth Grade
10: Tenth Grade
11: Eleventh Grade
12: Twelfth Grade
13: University Freshman
14: University Sophomore
And So On…

Mean: 7.708
Median: 7.8
Mode: 8.3, 7, 8.5, 7.8, 6.4, 6.9 (Useless though)
Hardest Fic According to Gunning-Fog: Time and Time - Cutlerine (10.3)
Easiest Fic According to Gunning-Fog: The Harvarsaga - Firebrand (6.1)

Full Data Sheet

A Leash of Foxes - Cutlerine
84.1
7.2
Anima Ex Machina: REBOOT - JX Valentine
73.3
8.2
Anima Ex Machina - JX Valentine
73.9
8.3
Communication - Sike Saner
79.6
7.0
Crack'd, or How the Love of Seafood Saved Unova - Cutlerine
78.1
8.4
Electric Sheep - JX Valentine
84.0
6.6
Fledglings - Spiteful Murkrow
77.3
8.0
Flying in the Dark (revised) - diamondpearl876
76.3
8.5
Hoenn League: A Brendan and May Adventure - Breezy
84.0
6.5
Lost Evolution - elyvorg
75.0
7.8
Lull - Breezy
85.9
6.0
Morphic - Dragonfree
77.6
8.3
Operation GEAR: The Angel of Reckoning - The Great Butler
72.1
9.1
Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Overthrown - Knightfall
72.5
9.9
Pokémon Ranger and the Gardener of Gratitude - The Great Butler
79.8
7.0
Requiem - Sidewinder
68.8
9.2
Roots - Mrs. Lovett
81.8
6.4
Salvage - Negrek
78.7
7.8
Survival Project - diamondpearl876
85.8
6.4
The Harvarsaga - Firebrand
83.8
6.1
The Human Species - ShadedSkies
73.8
7.4
The Legendarian Chronicles Revision 11 - Chibi Pika
82.1
6.9
The Retelling of Pokémon Colosseum - bobandbill
73.8
8.5
The Thinking Man's Guide to Destroying the World - Cutlerine
82.4
6.9
Time and Time - Cutlerine
69.0
10.3

I did this for fun?

 

[ChloboShoka]

Where did you test this? Sounds interesting. I want to try it on some of my work for fun.

 

[Polipuff]

https://support.office.com/en-gb/ar...9e-e80a-4777-8dd3-f7fc3c8b3fd2#__toc342546555 Microsoft Office has its built in readability checker.
https://quollwriter.com/user-guide/chapters/readability.html Quoll Writer does as well.
http://www.thewriter.com/what-we-think/readability-checker/ You can use this website too.

 

[icomeanon6]

Neat study, I hadn't heard of these metrics before. I tried passing a chapter I wrote recently through thewriter dot com's tool, and I found some interesting results when I broke it further down by scene (each scene is 1000+ words, so still good samples I think). The whole thing averaged an 80.3 FK/7.3 GF, but one scene which is almost all narration with only a few short lines of dialogue scored a 68 on FK with a whopping 11.1 for GF. The scene with the most dialogue got 83.1 FK/6.1 GF. My hunch from this is that (depending on how much a discrepancy there is between how your characters talk and how "you" as the narrator talk), narration can require substantially more effort to read when there's little dialogue breaking it up. Gunning-Fog seems particularly sensitive to narration-dialogue balance from what I've tested so far.

The other thing to bear in mind about these metrics is that they're calculated with syllable counts and sentence lengths. I'd be really interested if someone ever designed a metric that has a table to distinguish easier and harder words of the same number of syllables, say "excellent" vs. "acumen." That'd probably take a few PhD theses though. Who wants to get on that?

Cool stuff, thanks for putting this together!

 

[Samayouru]

Now this was interesting to read. I decided to do the test myself on the rewrite of Balance and got 82.3, which is interesting to say the least (but I guess since I'm writing from a little girl's perspective I guess the simplistic narrative would have an effect on the results).

 

[ChloboShoka]

May's Justice got 80.2 and my grade was six. Which says is the same reading level as Harry Potter.

 

[Venia Silente]

Built for Risk got 57, which is kinda college entry level apparently. A bit higher bar than what I was aiming at, even considering it is a fic with technical writing.

Meanwhile, Silly Human, Romance is for Nidoran~ gets a solid 68, and with the Lapine switched for ISO Standard English, a solid 69.

 

[Kutie Pie]

Interesting. I tested this for fun as well with my three main fics:

Forsaken (up to chapter fifteen):
80.4
7.2

Encryption (most of the written work, skipped around some):
82.6
6.6

Handle with Care:
82.6
7.2

So this is pretty much a good sign, I take it especially after testing Stephenie Meyer's work for the lulz.

 

[Blackjack Gabbiani]

https://support.office.com/en-gb/ar...9e-e80a-4777-8dd3-f7fc3c8b3fd2#__toc342546555 Microsoft Office has its built in readability checker.
https://quollwriter.com/user-guide/chapters/readability.html Quoll Writer does as well.
http://www.thewriter.com/what-we-think/readability-checker/ You can use this website too.

http://www.joeswebtools.com/text/readability-tests/ There's this site too if you don't have/use Office and don't want to sign up for a site.

The latest Obsession chapter (still under construction) gets this

The Flesch-Kincaid reading ease score is 69.7 (0 to 100, higher is best)
The Flesch-Kincaid grade level is 7.5th grade
The Gunning Fog index is 10 (average is 12, lower is best)
The Coleman-Liau index is 9.8
The SMOG index is 7.4
The automated readability index is 7

Though some of that seems inaccurate. I know it goes by syllables but I sure wasn't reading stuff like this in 7th grade.


Figurehead gets this

The Flesch-Kincaid reading ease score is 81.8 (0 to 100, higher is best)
The Flesch-Kincaid grade level is 4.6th grade
The Gunning Fog index is 6.9 (average is 12, lower is best)
The Coleman-Liau index is 8.3
The SMOG index is 5.3
The automated readability index is 3.5