How Well-Read Is Your Favorite Website? We're Number 10!

By Chuck Sudo in News on Dec 17, 2010 3:40PM

Time Out Chicago Editor-in-Chief Frank Sennett recently used the "reading level" function on Google's "Advanced Search" page to determine the reading levels of Our Town's media websites.

Sennett has a lot to crow about with TOC's second-place ranking. But we were pleasantly surprised to find Chicagoist rounding out the top ten at number 10. Using algorithms to determine the ratio of simple and polysyllabic words used on a website, the Google numbers indicate our numbers at a 53 percent basic reading level, 45 percent intermediate, and less than one percent advanced. (Yes, we used "pollysyllabic" in an attempt to jigger the advanced numbers a bit.)

As Sennett noted, "(I)n the world of journalism, writing simple, direct, serviceable prose is often the point." Indeed. Still, we were proud of the rankings and half-jokingly attributed it to you readers catching our typos. We may have "Chicagoist: We're Number Ten" t-shirts printed for the staff. And mis-transpose the apostrophe for effect.