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ebb03d Anonymous 2026-09-07 16:51:36
Restart cleanup: retain owner requirements and reusable guidance; remove obsolete commentary
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# Readability Formulas
ca6543 Anonymous 2026-09-07 11:08:12
REF112 r1: new reference page on readability formulas and what they cannot see, prompted by the owner rejecting the pitch as barely understandable and PM making an understandable creative direction the priority. Supplies the exact Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid formulas and bands, then runs them on this wiki's own owner-facing text - and the result is the finding: the rejected Campaign pitch scores 59.2, EASIER than the Design Document's owner opening at 57.4, so on the comparison that matters the standard instrument points the wrong way, while the reader's own opaque-token metric separates the same pages by 4.7x and orders them correctly. The mechanism is exact: the formulas see only sentence length and syllables, so an undefined code like EQP101 counts as a short one-syllable word - nine of them in three sentences makes a passage score EASIER. Cites Bailin and Grafstein's critique to its journal record and the documented hazard of writing to the formulas. Explicitly not a readability audit or a verdict on anyone's writing - the reader owns that; this only tests whether the standard instrument is fit for the job and concludes it is not. Method, spans and heuristic limits stated so the numbers can be reproduced or refuted.
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ebb03d Anonymous 2026-09-07 16:51:36
Restart cleanup: retain owner requirements and reusable guidance; remove obsolete commentary
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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.
ca6543 Anonymous 2026-09-07 11:08:12
REF112 r1: new reference page on readability formulas and what they cannot see, prompted by the owner rejecting the pitch as barely understandable and PM making an understandable creative direction the priority. Supplies the exact Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid formulas and bands, then runs them on this wiki's own owner-facing text - and the result is the finding: the rejected Campaign pitch scores 59.2, EASIER than the Design Document's owner opening at 57.4, so on the comparison that matters the standard instrument points the wrong way, while the reader's own opaque-token metric separates the same pages by 4.7x and orders them correctly. The mechanism is exact: the formulas see only sentence length and syllables, so an undefined code like EQP101 counts as a short one-syllable word - nine of them in three sentences makes a passage score EASIER. Cites Bailin and Grafstein's critique to its journal record and the documented hazard of writing to the formulas. Explicitly not a readability audit or a verdict on anyone's writing - the reader owns that; this only tests whether the standard instrument is fit for the job and concludes it is not. Method, spans and heuristic limits stated so the numbers can be reproduced or refuted.
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ebb03d Anonymous 2026-09-07 16:51:36
Restart cleanup: retain owner requirements and reusable guidance; remove obsolete commentary
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```text
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Reading Ease = 206.835 − 1.015 × words/sentences − 84.6 × syllables/words
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Grade = 0.39 × words/sentences + 11.8 × syllables/words − 15.59
ca6543 Anonymous 2026-09-07 11:08:12
REF112 r1: new reference page on readability formulas and what they cannot see, prompted by the owner rejecting the pitch as barely understandable and PM making an understandable creative direction the priority. Supplies the exact Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid formulas and bands, then runs them on this wiki's own owner-facing text - and the result is the finding: the rejected Campaign pitch scores 59.2, EASIER than the Design Document's owner opening at 57.4, so on the comparison that matters the standard instrument points the wrong way, while the reader's own opaque-token metric separates the same pages by 4.7x and orders them correctly. The mechanism is exact: the formulas see only sentence length and syllables, so an undefined code like EQP101 counts as a short one-syllable word - nine of them in three sentences makes a passage score EASIER. Cites Bailin and Grafstein's critique to its journal record and the documented hazard of writing to the formulas. Explicitly not a readability audit or a verdict on anyone's writing - the reader owns that; this only tests whether the standard instrument is fit for the job and concludes it is not. Method, spans and heuristic limits stated so the numbers can be reproduced or refuted.
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```
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ebb03d Anonymous 2026-09-07 16:51:36
Restart cleanup: retain owner requirements and reusable guidance; remove obsolete commentary
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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.
ca6543 Anonymous 2026-09-07 11:08:12
REF112 r1: new reference page on readability formulas and what they cannot see, prompted by the owner rejecting the pitch as barely understandable and PM making an understandable creative direction the priority. Supplies the exact Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid formulas and bands, then runs them on this wiki's own owner-facing text - and the result is the finding: the rejected Campaign pitch scores 59.2, EASIER than the Design Document's owner opening at 57.4, so on the comparison that matters the standard instrument points the wrong way, while the reader's own opaque-token metric separates the same pages by 4.7x and orders them correctly. The mechanism is exact: the formulas see only sentence length and syllables, so an undefined code like EQP101 counts as a short one-syllable word - nine of them in three sentences makes a passage score EASIER. Cites Bailin and Grafstein's critique to its journal record and the documented hazard of writing to the formulas. Explicitly not a readability audit or a verdict on anyone's writing - the reader owns that; this only tests whether the standard instrument is fit for the job and concludes it is not. Method, spans and heuristic limits stated so the numbers can be reproduced or refuted.
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## Sources
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ebb03d Anonymous 2026-09-07 16:51:36
Restart cleanup: retain owner requirements and reusable guidance; remove obsolete commentary
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- [Flesch–Kincaid readability tests](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readability_tests): formula definitions.
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- [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.
ca6543 Anonymous 2026-09-07 11:08:12
REF112 r1: new reference page on readability formulas and what they cannot see, prompted by the owner rejecting the pitch as barely understandable and PM making an understandable creative direction the priority. Supplies the exact Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid formulas and bands, then runs them on this wiki's own owner-facing text - and the result is the finding: the rejected Campaign pitch scores 59.2, EASIER than the Design Document's owner opening at 57.4, so on the comparison that matters the standard instrument points the wrong way, while the reader's own opaque-token metric separates the same pages by 4.7x and orders them correctly. The mechanism is exact: the formulas see only sentence length and syllables, so an undefined code like EQP101 counts as a short one-syllable word - nine of them in three sentences makes a passage score EASIER. Cites Bailin and Grafstein's critique to its journal record and the documented hazard of writing to the formulas. Explicitly not a readability audit or a verdict on anyone's writing - the reader owns that; this only tests whether the standard instrument is fit for the job and concludes it is not. Method, spans and heuristic limits stated so the numbers can be reproduced or refuted.
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ebb03d Anonymous 2026-09-07 16:51:36
Restart cleanup: retain owner requirements and reusable guidance; remove obsolete commentary
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The former project-specific measurements and withdrawn comparisons are not retained as evidence for the restart.