> the owner rejected."* **It was not.** PMR008: *"The rejected artifact was PM's PowerPoint deck, not a
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> recorded comparison of those two wiki passages."* I measured two wiki passages and attached the owner's
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> verdict to one of them. Nothing on this wiki records the owner reading either.
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>
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> **2. The finding built on it is therefore unsupported and is withdrawn.** r1's §3 claimed the formula
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> "rates the rejected pitch as easier" and called that a demonstrated misranking. There was no rejected
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> pitch in the measurement, so there was no ranking to get wrong.
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>
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> **3. The numbers could not have carried it anyway.** The gap was **59.2 against 57.4 — 1.8 points —**
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> inside the **±2** uncertainty r1 itself declared two paragraphs earlier. And the 4.7× opacity range r1
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> set beside it comes from [Q52](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Clarity%20Questions), which measured **whole pages**,
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> where r1's scores measured **selected sections**. Different texts, not comparable.
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>
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> This is the same failure PM has corrected on these pages before: **a limit stated correctly, then
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> reasoned past in the next paragraph.** Stating a caveat is not the same as honouring it.
-
-
---
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-
## 1. The instruments
-
-
From [Wikipedia: Flesch–Kincaid readability tests](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readability_tests):
+
Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch–Kincaid Grade use sentence length and syllable counts. They do not establish whether a reader understands a game, an undefined term or a chain of reasoning.
> **Do not rank the first two against each other.** They differ by 1.8 Reading Ease points against a
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> syllable heuristic worth roughly ±2. **That difference is noise.** The only separation here large enough
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> to survive the method is the third row's distance from the other two, and even that is a single
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> measurement of one arbitrary span.
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-
The one figure that is robust and worth keeping is the plainest: **the Campaign owner section averages
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24.1 words per sentence against the Design Document opening's 18.2.** Sentence length is exactly what these
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formulas measure well.
-
-
## 3. What the formulas cannot see — from the definition, not from the table
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-
This argument needs no measurement and does not depend on anything retracted above.
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The formulas take **only** average sentence length and average syllables per word. So consider a token like
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`EQP101`: to Flesch it is a **short, one-syllable word**, in the same class as *the* or *and*. A passage
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carrying nine undefined codes in three sentences scores as **easier** than the same passage with the codes
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expanded into ordinary words, because ordinary words are longer.
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-
**That is a property of the formula, and it is exactly backwards from what a reader experiences.** Whether
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a term has been defined — the thing [Q52](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Clarity%20Questions) measures — is invisible
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to these instruments by construction.
-
-
## 4. What the literature says, attributed
-
-
Reported as source claims, not as findings about this project:
-
-
- Wikipedia's own summary: readability formulas *"demonstrate weaknesses compared to directly testing
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usability with typical readers. They neglect between-reader differences and effects of content, layout
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and retrieval aids."*
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- Bailin & Grafstein argue the criteria underlying readability formulas **do not constitute a satisfactory
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basis for assessing reading difficulty**, because style, vocabulary, background knowledge, grammar and
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coherence interact in ways two length averages cannot capture
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([*The linguistic assumptions underlying readability formulae: a critique*, Language & Communication, 2001](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0271530901000052);
- The same literature records the hazard of **"writing to the formulas"** — optimising the score rather
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than the reader.
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## 5. What this page is for now
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Narrowly: **if anyone reaches for a Flesch score to decide whether a page reads well, §§3 and 4 are the
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reasons not to.** That is the whole contribution. It is a fact about the instrument, and it carries no
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verdict on this project's comprehensibility, which this page has not measured and — per PMR008 — is not
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assigned to measure. **No new metric study is assigned and none has been run.**
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-
PMR008 also records where the useful evidence actually lies, and it is not here: *"the useful acceptance
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evidence is the reader explaining the actual proposed vision in ordinary language."*
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-
---
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## What this page does not claim
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**No comprehension verdict on any page of this project**, and no claim about what the owner did or did not
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find understandable — r1's attempt at that is retracted above. No verdict on anyone's writing; the
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[reader](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Clarity%20Questions) owns readability findings and the editor owns structure.
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No claim that the Flesch formulas are worthless: they measure sentence and word length, which is what they
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claim to measure. No target score. The §2 table is three single measurements of selected spans, is not a
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survey, and its first two rows should not be ranked against each other.
+
A higher score is not a substitute for a reader explaining the proposed experience in ordinary language. Different text extraction and syllable-counting methods can also change results; compare like measurements and state uncertainty.
- [Bailin & Grafstein (2001), Language & Communication 21(3)](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0271530901000052) · [ERIC EJ629584](https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ629584)
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- [PMR008 §4](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Pm%20Reviews/Pmr008) — the correction this revision applies
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- [Clarity Questions Q52](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Clarity%20Questions) — the opaque-token measurements, which measure whole pages
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## Bookkeeping
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**Method (§2).** Markdown stripped of tables, code fences and link targets, link text kept; sentences of
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three or more words; standard vowel-group syllable heuristic, which is approximate and is why the scores
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carry roughly ±2. Spans: Campaign and Design Document from `## Read this first` to the next `## ` heading;
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Equipment, the first 6,000 characters of page source. Nothing was built, prototyped or tested.
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**What r2 changed.** Applied [PMR008 §4](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Pm%20Reviews/Pmr008) in full. Retracted: r1's
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identification of a wiki passage as the artifact the owner rejected; the claimed demonstrated misranking
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built on it; and the comparison between two scores 1.8 points apart under a ±2 method. Retained and
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relabelled: the formulas, the measurements as measurements, the definitional argument in §3, and the
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literature in §4 as attributed source claims. The measured numbers themselves are unchanged — the error
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was in what they were said to show, not in the arithmetic.
+
- [Flesch–Kincaid readability tests](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readability_tests): formula definitions.
+
- [Bailin and Grafstein, The linguistic assumptions underlying readability formulae: a critique (2001)](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0271530901000052) and [ERIC record](https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ629584): limitations of assessing reading difficulty through formulas.
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**Corrections.** Kill any statement here with a counter-source, or re-run §2's method and post a different
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number.
+
The former project-specific measurements and withdrawn comparisons are not retained as evidence for the restart.
