Your editors have been working hard creating a distinct writing style for your blog. But what happens when you throw in one of those new editors you just hired? The learning curve begins. You hope they absorb your style guide and pay careful attention to the tone of your other editors.
Sometimes, depending on their background, your new editors may be too technical or too informal in their writing style. It’s all a matter of educating these editors through the use of proper tools. One such tool is the FD Word Statistics Plugin for WordPress. FD Word Statistics gives you the word and sentence count for the post you’re writing and also includes three different readability scores. Below is a screenshot of what the plugin looks like in the top and bottom of the WordPress post editor.
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What are these three readability scores? The plugin uses the Flesch, the Flesch-Kincaid (known as Kincaid within the plugin) and the Gunning-Fog methods of readability analysis.
Flesch and Flesch-Kincaid
To quote the plugins author, “The Flesch and Flesch-Kincaid methods use formulas based on the average number of words per sentence and the average number of syllables per word.”
Gunning-Fog
“Gunning-Fog method uses a formula based on the average number of words per sentence and the percentage of “hard” words (words with 3 or more syllables) in the passage.” Also from the author.
Both the Gunning-Fog and Kincaid score give you the general education level for which you would need to read your post while the Flesch score gives you a percentage based on readability. The higher the Flesch percentage score the better the readability.
New Editors
Install the FD Word Statistics plugin and enable it for a your current editors. Have them track the scores they receive on their articles. Take all of your editors score and come up with an average. When you have a new editor come on board, test their post against the average scores from your established editors. This will be a compass for your new editor to determine if they need to raise or lower the bar of their posts.
