My blog's smarter than I am

I just found out my blog is a genius. Yep, that's right. (Oh no. Did it just drop a few IQ points? Do geniuses say "yep"?)

Someone in the Etsy forums gave a link to a site that will rate the readability of your blog, from grade school to genius. The Blog Readability Test supposedly rates what level of education is needed to understand your blog. Of course, it says nothing about the quality of the layout or features, the value of the information, or the uniqueness of the views presented. And having a high level in the blog world is not necessarily a good thing.

I used to work on a professional journal where we thought it was fine to challenge the reader, even make them crack their dictionaries once in a while, but publications with a broader audience often find it necessary to "dumb down" the vocabulary and monitor the length and complexity of the sentences.

I'll admit I'm a snob though. I cringe (don't we all) when listening to speeches by our fine leader, still-President Bush, and it's sad to compare that with the level of thought and range of vocabulary displayed by your average person not fifty or seventy years ago. Our knowledge of words is contracting, and our patience with complexity has all but disappeared.

I could lament this sad state of affairs, along with the decline of the American newspaper and the quality of our education, but instead I'll share this quote by the great Nobel Prize-winning writer V.S. Naipaul: "There can be no showing off in literature. You want simply to be read." I think this applies to blogs as well.

Genius, shmenius.