People who have tried reading the Kent Hovind thesis say that English as a Second Language students write better, or that it sounds like an eight year old could have done better (On my summer vacation, I earned a PhD!). I decided to get the stats. I found a page on addedbytes.com that does a full analysis. I copied in the full text of the thesis, and below are its findings.
I especially like the footnote on the results “Scores over 22 should generally be taken to mean graduate level text” when you consider that Kent Hovind’s thesis scores an average 8.12. Short sentences with small, simple words are much of the problem here.
Feel free to grab the full text export of the PDF thesis, and try it yourself.
| Readability Formula | Score | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease (Wikipedia) | 68.50 | A higher score indicates easier readability (scores go from 0 to 100). |
| Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level * (Wikipedia) | 7.20 | |
| Gunning-Fog Score * (Wikipedia) | 9.60 | |
| Coleman-Liau Index * (Wikipedia) | 10.00 | |
| SMOG Index * (Wikipedia) | 7.50 | |
| Automated Readability Index * (Wikipedia) | 6.30 | |
| Average Grade Level * | 8.12 | Excludes Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease score. |
* These scores return a “grade level”, based on the USA education system. A grade level is equivalent to the number of years of education a person has had. Scores over 22 should generally be taken to mean graduate level text.
The tool reported that this text contained 1838 sentences, with 26149 words (14.23 per sentence) made up of 38301 syllables (1.46 per word).
Just to be clear, though, the grade level in this sense refers to a reading level (meaning his paper can be read/understood fairly easily by someone with an 8th grade education), not the grade level of the writing.
Not that it still isn’t garbage, of course.