Readability Indices

Readability indexes, which are ways to calulate the grade-level of a piece of text, have been around for a long time. A teacher in junior high suggested we compute them for articles we had written for a class as an experiment. Since they are now easy to compute, based on measures like syllables in a word and words in a sentence, there are a number of packages that deliver them. Are they really meaningful? A WSJ article discusses the implications. This article also introduced me to the numbers guy blog in the WSJ.