Writing related

Sisu points to a site that evaluates the readability of blogs.

Select Readability Tests at Juicy Studios, plug in the URL to your blog (or a specific post or an archived month if you want), click and when the next screen comes up, scroll down for the results. There it is along another table for comparison purposes as well as explanations.

According to the chart, I'm writing somewhere between the fifth and eighth grade reading level: the range of most newspapers. I'm exactly where I want to be because it took a lot of hard work for me to get there.

A lot.

I'd developed the reputation at work, "If nobody else can figure out how to write it, give it to "Doyle."

I was cranking government stuff out right and left: budget narratives, brochures, grant proposals, procedures . . . and everybody loved what I wrote, especially the bosses whose names it went out under.

I look back now and cringe.

Passive voice had become an automatic with me.

I wrote in passive voice automatically.

While not as bad as some of the others at work, I'd also fallen into the practice of writing endless sentences filled with jargon, acronyms and awe-inspiring phraseology; each one defying description because of its complexity, believing that in separating the multitude of phrases with a variety of punctuation marks I was amplifying understanding so that the message I was endeavoring to transmit would be more effortlessly comprehended which would, therefore, impress upon everyone the absolute urgency of the matter being presented for their consideration.

Instead of writing in a clear and concise manner, I wrote gobbledegook.

There's no shame in writing simply. It can be hard work, though, getting back to writing English after years of churning out bilge.