readability statistics

[Emily]

I am a student in a masters program at an online university. The prof. is
using Word's readability statistics as an indication of the quality of our
writing. I have recently discovered that an identical piece of writing
produces different scores on my computer than it does on his (his are
higher). We appear to have the same version of Word: Word 2003 that is part
of the Professional 2003 Edition.

Anyone have any ideas as to what might be causing the differences?

 

[Jezebel]

Just a thought: one of the computers might have a style set to 'Do not check
spelling or grammar' (under Style > Modify > Language), AND the document is
set to update styles when opened (under Tools > Templates and Add-ins).

Rather than worry about it, you could chastise your prof for doing this at
all. Readability stats are not a useful indicator of quality of writing,
except in the Readers Digest sense. They are meaningless for anything
written with tertiary level content. Ask the prof to explain why Moby Dick
is 'badly written'...

 

[Emily]

Thank you Jezebel, I will check into that.

The prof. is urging us to write at what Word considers a 9th grade level and
with a high readability score - the higher the better. I agree that it isn't
a good indicator of the quality of the writing, but I'm afraid I'm not in a
position to question his approach.