Saturday, October 14, 2006

Loquacity

I was shocked, shocked (1) to discover, this morning, that Renewable Music had entered the top ten reblog sources over at New Music ReBlog. This being a distress signal for over-production, I promise now to do my very best to return to the respectable second tier where scoundrels, artists, and the constitutionally lazy ought to reside.

The truly shocking thing about this is that I'm someone who has run hot and cold when it comes to talking or writing about music. There have literally been years when I've thought that there was nothing to be said or, at least, I had nothing to say about music. During those times, I've usually done my best to simply shut up. The Age of the Blog (2) just happened to arrived during a spell when this was not the case.

From time-to-time, in these pages, I have written things that are provocative. But so far, complaints have been limited. While I suppose that this is mostly a measure of low readership and low readability (3), I do have to wonder if in part this is because new music has entered the Age of the Blog at a time in its development when its capacity to provoke, excite, or, indeed shock, is at a low point. If so, we've simply got to get back to work.
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1. Shamelessly sentimentality-betraying movie reference.
2. Shamelessly age-betraying allusion to the "Age of the Feuillton" in Das Glasperlenspiel.
3. Slight exaggeration. A reading level analysis of this blog notes that the average number of words in a sentence was 18.2, the percentage of words with three or more syllables is 17.55%, the average syllables per word is 1.62, the Gunning Fog Index is 14.32, the Flesch Reading Ease is 51.54, and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade 10.61. On the basis of the Gunning Fog Index, readership here is expected to be somewhat higher than (College) sophomoric, the Flesch Index indicates that it is slightly more difficult that the 60-70 score desired for general audiences, and the Flesch-Kinkaid grade is higher that that of the New York Times, but lower than that of Academic Papers. Okay, dudes, I can live with that.

3 comments:

Scott said...

What did you use for the reading level analysis?

Daniel Wolf said...

Scott, I used this:

http://juicystudio.com/services/readability.php?url=

Scott said...

Thanks! I find your blog quite readable, but professors are bad people to ask that question.