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Wednesday, May 05, 2010

Gobbledygook

I found this great content analysis tool online called Gobbledygook Grader. You copy text into it and it "evaluates your written content (press release, brochure copy, etc.) and checks for use of gobbledygook, jargon, cliches and over-used, hype-filled words."

I decided to drop in my last post to see what my Gobbledygook quotient was. I was bit nervous when I hit the go button, but I was pleasantly surprised when the report generated gave me a score of 100 out of 100 and told me, "This release contains 0 words that are considered gobbledygook (they're overused and lack specific meaning)."

So it has officially been validated that I don't write gobbledygook after all! The report does say that anyone who reads my blog needs to have at least a 12th grade education to understand what I've written, so this explains why I don't get much traffic at my site.

To get a fair sample, I ran another test with a different post and scored a 97 out of 100 because I used one gobbledygook word: resonate. But to make up for it, you only need to have an 11th grade education to understand the post.

Another cool feature of the Gobbledygook Grader is that it creates something called a "Word Cloud." A word cloud graphically depicts word use frequency by displaying key words from your text in font size that relates to the number of times the word is used. The theory is that words related to the theme of what you are writing about should be bigger than other words. I was pleased to see the the biggest word in my first word cloud was train (the post was about my daily commute on the train). The biggest word on the second word cloud was "humor."  It was a post about my sense of humor.

I wish I had a badge to post on my blog now that certifies me Gobbledygook Free. But then people would probably misread it and assume I'm giving away free gobbledygook.

Communication is such a fragile thing.

1 comment:

R. said...

Awesome - both your high signal to noise ratio on your blog and the Gobbledygook filter.

You can also use the Gobbledygook filter at work. If your marketing propaganda scores less than 25% you know it's gold. Oh, and don't forget song lyrics for the top 10 charts.

That's the power of the free synergy in the cloud intelligence accelerating your business competitiveness to the extreme. Wow!