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Date Posted: 02:28:48 04/18/25 Fri
Author: AusNick
Author Host/IP: 1.43.214.67
Subject: The more you know.

Was prepping filler for NSC 144, from the archive of stories DU furnished me with, and saw something in one that got my attention.

The story in question is irrelevant at this stage, you'll see it when you read 144, the filler content of which will definitely be a mixed bag, and you might want to skip some of the content honestly.

Anyway, what caught my eye were two things, the author of the story provided a word count, which could have been done automatically by the site where it had been posted, some sites do that, or used to anyway. the other thing, the one I found interesting was the inclusion of a Flesch-Kincaid Score.

For anyone interested, here's the link.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readability_tests

I hate using Wikipedia as a source, but it was convenient, albeit a bit of a dry and slightly confusing read.

I guess the TL;DR is this: The F-K system is comprised of two parts, the Flesch Reading Ease score, and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score. The former obviously scoring the ease of readability, and the latter, also obviously, scoring the grade level at which a text can be read. The two tests are basically the same, but the results are weighted differently for different uses.

I don't know if any of this would be useful or even relevant to us, but I did find it interesting. I suppose it could be useful for authors to tighten up their prose, improve the quality of writing, but I doubt anyone would bother to use it. Personally, I think it's something that should be built into Word Processors. I mean there are tools that automatically check your spelling and grammar, and AI tools that pretty much do the writing for you, which is lazy and cringe, and you shouldn't use it, but not F-K scoring, something that would actually be useful.

I looked at a few tools, most being web-based, which means uploading text, convenient, but uh, privacy? I saw there were tools for iOS, but no way in hell would I write anything big enough to bother scoring on my phone. I vaguely recall there being stuff for Windows and Android but I didn't pay them any attention. I can only assume there is something out there for macOS, but I didn't see anything.

But I am now curious about it, just as how I have long been curious about how the content of the library would be classified in the Dewey Decimal Catalogue. It's a Library, it needs to be catalogued appropriately. Any Librarians in the house?

(sigh)

Touching back on NSC 144 briefly, a lot of it looks like it's going to be filler, sorry about that, but I've only had two new stories so far this month (thanks Baz and Azilwen), and with 10 days left, it's getting toward the pointy end of the month. Filler I've got, enough for a few months more of regular releases, the quality of the filler is a bit more concerning, you'll probably see a lot of stuff that shouldn't have been written.

All that aside, it's Good Friday (here) today, Easter is on the way, and I'd completely forgotten about it. I've still got eggs and stuff from a couple of years ago. Used to be a functioning chocoholic, too. For want of fish fingers, AusNick went hungry. After midnight though, I'll become a full carnivore again.

Nick

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