Manure Madness
The Road to the Final Foul
Round 1: Verbal Diarrhea
Official definition of Verbal Diarrhea: the inability to say something in less than a page when one sentence would suffice. Companies in the business of selling everything from magnetic resonance imaging equipment to magnets for refrigerators all feel compelled to use 50 cent words to make a 5 cent point.
In this round of action, we’ve adapted the mostly widely used and accepted measure of readability – the Flesch Reading Ease Score. Developed in the 1940’s by Rudolph Flesch, the formula is based on the physiology of the brain and uses average sentence length and the average word length to evaluate a document. We’ve inverted the formula, so that the higher the score, the harder it is to read. Based on our scoring system, Internal Revenue Code scores a mind numbing 106, while a comic book ranks at about 10. Anything above a 60 is considered difficult to read.
Tune in to this qualifying round to see America’s leading companies battle it out on the pulp to see who can be the most rude, offensive and incomprehensible to their readers.
Scoring Specifics
The Flesch score is based on the average number of syllables per word and words per sentence. The Flesch Reading Ease score is based on a 100 point scale. We’ve inverted the score so that the higher the score, the more difficult it is to comprehend.
Reading Ease Score = 100.0 - 206.835 – (1.015 x ASL) – (84.6 x ASW)
ASL: average sentence length (number of words divided by the number of sentences)
ASW: average number of syllables per word (number of syllables divided by number of words)
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