This Surprising Reading Level Analysis Will Change the Way You Write By Shane Snow January 28th, 2015 Ernest Hemingway is regarded as one of the world’s greatest writers. After running some nerdy reading level stats, I now respect him even more. The other day, a friend and I were talking about becoming better writers by looking at the “reading levels” of our work. Scholars have formulas for automatically estimating reading level using syllables, sentence length, and other proxies for vocabulary and concept complexity. After the chat, just for fun, I ran a chapter from my book through the most common one , the Flesch-Kincaid index: I learned, to my dismay, that I’ve been writing for 8th graders. Curiosity piqued, I decided to see how I compared to the first famous writer that...