Yesterday there was a post on PickTheBrain titled Improve Your Writing with a Conversation Tone. What I found most interesting about it was the link to the Readability index calculator, which scans text you enter in order to calculate the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease score and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade level.

The Reading Ease score is typically 90 for comics and 10 for legalese. Time magazine is about a 52, and Reader’s Digest is about a 65. The Grade level is theoretically the grade you have to reach in order to understand the text, but it’s not perfect: Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham gives a grade level of -1.3. Both Reading Ease and Grade are based on the number of words per sentence and the number of syllables per word, but these measures are weighted differently by the two formulas.

When you write posts that a 10th grader can understand, that doesn’t mean you’re dumbing them down because you think your audience couldn’t make it through 10th grade. It means you’re avoiding pretentious words and convoluted sentences so you sound more like a person and less like a textbook. The less effort it takes people to figure out what you’re trying to say, the more they can ponder what you’re saying. Of course, some situations require complex language, but in general, we should try to avoid it.

I’m subscribed to 48 blogs, and I decided to put them to the test. Out of the 48, I find 13 of them especially enjoyable to read, and I find 8 of them especially painful to read (I read those 8 either because they have very good information, or they’re very popular and I’m still trying to figure out why). It occurred to me that the blogs I find enjoyable to read would probably have high readability scores, so I decided to conduct an interesting (though highly unscientific) experiment.

To save time, I only tested the 13 most enjoyable blogs and the 8 least enjoyable blogs (in a slightly narcissistic move, I included my own blog among the most enjoyable). I used the most recent post from each blog, unless it was a guest post, contained a lot of quoted material, was too short, or was otherwise unusual, in which case I moved on to the next most recent post.

The results were what I expected for the most part: the blogs I liked generally had the highest readability scores, while the blogs I didn’t like generally had the lowest scores. Here are the rankings for the top ten most readable blogs I subscribe to, after filtering out two that I don’t like reading, sorted by Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease score (with a secondary sort by Grade level and a tertiary sort by blog name).

#1: brip blap (Reading Ease score: 64; Grade level: 8)

#2: zenhabits (Reading Ease score: 62; Grade level: 8)

#3: Seth’s Blog (Reading Ease score: 61; Grade level: 9)

#4: Hunter Nuttall . com (Reading Ease score: 60; Grade level: 9)

#5 (tie): Conrad Hees’ Blog (Reading Ease score: 57; Grade level: 9)

#5 (tie): Steve Pavlina’s Personal Development Blog (Reading Ease score: 57; Grade level: 9)

#7: Early Retirement Extreme (Reading Ease score: 56; Grade level: 11)

#8: Skelliewag.org (Reading Ease score: 52; Grade level: 10)

#9: Tim Ferriss’s 4-Hour Workweek and Lifestyle Design Blog (Reading Ease score: 50; Grade level: 10)

#10: On Moneymaking (Reading Ease score: 50; Grade level: 11)

(Had the list been sorted by Grade level before Reading Ease score, Early Retirement Extreme would be pushed down to #9.)

The blogs I’m subscribed to that I don’t take pleasure in reading had Reading Ease scores around 40, and Grade levels around 14. So the message is clear: be easy to understand, and people will like listening to you.

OK, that headline was just meant to get your attention. I don’t really hate Christmas. In fact, I love Christmas. Everyone’s nicer this time of year, it’s acceptable to pig out on cookies and eggnog, and you get to see the Grinch find the strength of ten Grinches, plus two.

What I do hate is the excessive commercialization of Christmas.

Christmas is supposedly to celebrate the birth of Jesus, and yet everyone else thinks they’re the birthday boy. It’s less a time of peace and goodwill than it is a time of ca-ching!

What I’m against specifically is the tradition of adults insisting that Christmas involve massive gift giving. When this time of year rolls around, family members ask “what do you want for Christmas?” Not “do you want anything for Christmas, considering that you already have way too much,” but “what do you want?” The next question is usually “OK, and what else?”

For kids, this makes perfect sense. Kids need the latest, hottest toys and gadgets to be happy. They have plenty of imagination to decide what they need, and all the time in the world to enjoy these things when they get them. Furthermore, they’re unable to get them unless an adult buys them.

But why do adults need so many toys?

If I want something, I’m perfectly capable of getting it myself. I don’t want to make someone take time out of their busy schedule, drive around a mall’s parking lot looking for a space, fight their way through the crowd, shop around trying to find something I would like, and spend their hard earned money because they feel obligated to get me something. The end result is that people spend too much money buying people things that they may not even like, and that they could have gotten for themselves much more easily.

In China, people give money for the major holidays, and it goes only from people who have it to people who need it. Simple, practical, and it makes sense.

I appreciate the thought and effort that goes into gift giving, but I don’t think that’s the best way to expend thought and effort. Why not just put more thought and effort into enjoying each other’s company? Why not help someone figure out how to improve their life next year?

I appreciate that people want to spend money on me, but it’s really not necessary. And since I also have to spend money on them, it becomes a nuclear arms race to see who can outdo whom. Why not spend money on some unpaid leave around Christmas? Or why not continue to give big gifts, but only in those years when there’s something that’s clearly needed and wanted? (And why not get it after Christmas to save time and money?)

People have the right attitude around Christmas, but I think when we get lazy and decide to express that attitude by buying lots of gifts just for the sake of doing so, we cheapen the spirit of Christmas. Buddhists believe that people would be happier without presents. I would, but I can’t say that everyone would go for that. However, I do think that many people would get a lot more out of Christmas if we could collectively cut back on the commercialism. Less truly is more.