{"id":389,"date":"2010-12-11T14:56:05","date_gmt":"2010-12-11T18:56:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/?p=389"},"modified":"2016-01-31T20:57:46","modified_gmt":"2016-02-01T00:57:46","slug":"evaluating-bible-reading-levels-with-google","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/2010\/12\/evaluating-bible-reading-levels-with-google\/","title":{"rendered":"Evaluating Bible Reading Levels with Google"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Google <a href=\"http:\/\/www.seroundtable.com\/google-reading-level-search-filter-12625.html\">recently introduced<\/a> a &#8220;Reading Level&#8221; feature on their <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/advanced_search\">Advanced Search page<\/a> that allows you to see the distribution of reading levels for a query.<\/p>\n<p>If we constrain a search to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.biblegateway.com\/\">Bible Gateway<\/a> and restrict URLs to individual translations, we get a decent picture of how English translations stack up in terms of reading levels:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/a.openbible.info\/blog\/2010-12-reading-levels.png\" width=\"787\" height=\"641\" alt=\"According to this methodology, the Amplified Bible is the hardest to read (probably because its nature is to have long sentences), and the NIrV is the easiest.\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Caveats abound:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>URLs don&#8217;t have a 1:1 correspondence to passages, so some passages get counted twice while others don&#8217;t get counted at all.<\/li>\n<li>Google doesn&#8217;t publish its criteria for what constitutes different reading levels.<\/li>\n<li>These numbers are probably best thought of in relative, rather than absolute, terms.<\/li>\n<li>Searching translation-specific websites yields different numbers. For example, constraining the search to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.esvonline.org\/\">esvonline.org<\/a> results in 57% Basic \/ 42% Intermediate results for the ESV, massively different from the 18% Basic \/ 80% Intermediate results above.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/a.openbible.info\/blog\/2010-12-reading-levels.xlsx\">Download the raw spreadsheet<\/a> if you&#8217;re interested in exploring more. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Google recently introduced a &#8220;Reading Level&#8221; feature on their Advanced Search page that allows you to see the distribution of reading levels for a query. If we constrain a search to Bible Gateway and restrict URLs to individual translations, we get a decent picture of how English translations stack up in terms of reading levels: [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=389"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1142,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389\/revisions\/1142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}