Ethan “Zvents” Stock caught yet-another-incomprehensible-corporate-press-release:
No, this is not the first paragraph, it’s just the title. A crime against the English Langue, says Ethan, and I agree. Ethan contrasts it to “the gold standard for communicating meaning without baloney“: Winston Churchill’s famous final paragraph of his 1940 “We shall fight on the beaches” speech.
I thought I’d run som numbers on these two gems.
The Gunning-Fog Readability Test is a rough measure of how many years of schooling it would take for someone to understand the content. The lower the number, the more understandable the content is. Results over seventeen are reported as seventeen, where seventeen is considered post-graduate level.
- Microsoft-Nortel: 17 (maxed out at post-graduate level)
- Winston Churchill: 12.66
For reference, here are some typical index scores:
6 TV guides, The Bible, Mark Twain
8 Reader’s Digest
8 – 10 Most popular novels
10 Time, Newsweek
11 Wall Street Journal
14 The Times, The Guardian
15 – 20 Academic papers
Over 20 Only government sites can get away with this, because you can’t ignore them.
Over 30 The government is covering something upMy own little test shows most business blogs are in the 8-10 range. Ethan scores 9.83, I am rated 8.38.
Now, let’s take another most scientific test: the Gematriculator. “The Gematriculator is a service that uses the infallible methods of Gematria developed by Mr. Ivan Panin to determine how good or evil a web site or a text passage is.” The results:
- Microsoft-Nortel: 50% Evil, 50% Good
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Winston Churchill: 29% Evil 71% Good
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Your site: ___ (?)
Now, if you ask me, no, I don’t believe in pseudo-science… but it’s 105 degrees outside 
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