BrandweekNRX most readable healthcare blog!

After becoming a physician, I started my career in business in advertising; as a copywriter. So readability is key to me. After all, if you don't get your audience to read or understand your message, you waste your time.

So, it came as a pleasant surprise that the PAL blog had reviewed various tools on the net to check readability of various healthcare and pharma blogs.

Even nicer was that the two blogs I write - BrandweekNRX and Question Authority won by far, using any of the three measurements. It is also notworthy that two other professional blogs, the Wall Street Journal and Star-Ledger's Pharmalot, came in number 3 and 4.

I know, I know. Men like to sound important, and often write complicated texts and may feel it is somehow bad that I write simple prose. BUT, writing simple text is no easy task. If it was, more people would do this . . .

Here are the tools used:

The Criticsrant.com test.

The Flesh-Kincaid and Gunning Fog test.

And these are the results. What gives these tests som validity in my mind is that both blogs I write score almost exactly the same, even though they are very different:

Blog	Flesh-Kincaid Grade	Gunning Fog Index	Criticsrant.com test
Question Authority	5.11	8.33	Junior High School
BrandweekNRx	5.46	8.66	Junior High School
Pharmalot	6.5	9.0	College (postgrad)
WSJ Health Blog	6.55	10.41	High School
Kevin M.D. Health Blog	7.57	10.99	High School
PharmaGossip	7.48	11.26	College (postgrad)
PAL blog	8.10	11.95	Genius
PharmaMarketing Blog	9.06	13.01	College (undergrad)
Healthcare Renewal	9.19	13.00	College (postgrad)
PostScript	9.4	13.63	College (postgrad)
Drug Channels	9.9	13.91	College (postgrad)

And here are som explanations:

The Flesh-Kincaid Grade and the Gunning Fog Index are a rough measure of how many years of schooling it would take someone to understand the content, using two different algorithms.

They use average number of words per sentence, percentage of difficult words in the sample and average number of syllables per word to do their measurements.

The Criticsrants.com test shows what level education someone needs to understand the text. There is no explanation for how this test is calculated.

By the way, here is a comparison between the four Brandweek blogs:

Blog	Flesh-Kincaid Grade	Gunning Fog Index	Criticsrant.com test
Short Takes	3.64	6.51	Elementary School
Sticker Shock	5.37	8.19	Junior High School
BrandweekNRx	5.46	8.66	Junior High School
The Brandwiki	6.34	9.72	High School

Comments

[Adam Fein]

Congrats on the low scores.

Drug Channels (my blog) scores the highest on both measures of complexity. I guess that explains why my blog keeps getting beaten up for its lunch money.

Adam
http://www.DrugChannels.net

[Rory J. Thompson]

Peter:

Ouch. You're killin' me. Short Takes hits an elementary-school-level reader? Criminy. So all those fan mails I get are just a buncha school bullies playing with my head? WaaWaaWaa!

Best,

Rory J. Thompson, Editor, "Short Takes"