Since I’m like a bluejay easily fascinated by shiny objects, the online reading level test offered by Critics Rant had some appeal, and I ran it on this blog. You can see the result to the right.
I didn’t think I’d be dismayed by this. First, I know how unreliable online tests are. They’re four-IQ-point Perl, Visual Basic and Java Scripts crawling the internet hoping to get lucky. They probably do a basic grammatical test, so even if I wrote gibberish with a lot of commas and verbs in odd places, they’d consider it a postgraduate level text. But even more, the thought worried me: what if they were right?
In my life, the one factor that has made the difference between misery and delight has been learning. I didn’t write “education,” because there’s a difference, but finding the truth (loosely defined as how things work consistently in the shared reality we call physical space!) of any discipline, matter, notion or act has always made me feel free from the great weight of negative “what could be” that we call fear. It’s like a darkened room not made light, but I have a map, now.
If those results are in any way true, I’m stubbornly not going to change. I think the rest of the world should. This blog isn’t that complicated. More people need to get acquainted with this style of writing so they can appreciate the beauty of learning, especially from books, which get good when they start at this level (the best books are usually far more articulate, and less bloggish). Learning is fun. Reading is power that requires oppressing no one. Pass it on.