Home » blogs » aperdue's blog

Tasting notes for seventh-graders

I just completed my article on Northwest Riesling (ah, the thrill of deadline!). For a variety of reasons, I chose to use Google Docs to write it.

A cool little tool in Google Docs is a word counter that also includes reading levels. According to this, I've written to a seventh-grade level. That makes sense since newspaper journalists tend to target about seventh- or eighth-grade reading levels.

I seriously doubt a seventh-grader would ever want to read about how a Riesling shows off aromas of river rock and Braeburn apples and flavors of ripe peaches with 2.3% residual sugar and a pH of 3.01.

Just my guess.

By aperdue at May 30 2008 - 9:02pm | books/reference | white wine | aperdue's blog | 568 reads

7th grade wine appreciation

"newspaper journalists tend to target about seventh- or eighth-grade reading levels"

I remind myself that not every reader of newspapers and blogs and wine sites has a doctoral degee (and that not all doctorates are all that bright - I've seen some pretty unimpressive MD/PhDs come out of venerated American universities) but still....

Isn't the nation which touts itself as the greatest on the planet capable of more?

...or is this what writers and winemakers expect of or presume about their audience?

By redwinebuzz at Tue, 06/03/2008 - 7:02am | login or register to post comments

Reading

Actually, the "target range" has more to do with the length of words and numbers of syllables. As a mass medium, we need to make newspapers readable for all (children read the newspaper, too).

I just finished reading a book of Hunter Thompson's early personal letters, written between the late 1950s to about 1968. I suspect that if we ran this through the same test, it would have been no higher than 10th grade reading level.

By aperdue at Tue, 06/03/2008 - 7:30am | login or register to post comments

7th grader in the audience

Perhaps that kid winemaker in the Willamette Valley?

By andyplymale at Sat, 05/31/2008 - 6:57pm | login or register to post comments

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.