Lexile Scores

Matt Yglesias at Slow Boring (paywalled):

Half of adults read below a 6th grade level. All questions of snobbery and nepo babies aside, the typical American could not do the job of even a really incompetent journalist. They would, in fact, struggle badly to even read and understand journalism outputs.

J.F.C.

Schools widely use the Lexile scale to assess both reading competence and the difficulty of written materials. A typical New York Times article is a 1380 on the scale, which is in the upper range of grade level for 11th and 12th grades. If you can read a New York Times article, you are part of the hyper-literate educated elite. If you mostly socialize with people who can pull this off, you exist in a kind of out-of-touch bubble.

This clearly raises an obvious question that only Codex could answer with a reasonable amount of effort: what are the Lexile scores of the articles on this blog?¹

So I’m a bit more accessible than the NYT and roughly at a 9th-grade level. In case you’re as curious as I was, two articles tied for max score: The Engineer’s Serenity Prayer & Favorite Movie Scores.

The two lowest scoring posts were linked-list items with one line comments (Elam Endings & Wormhole Technology, so putting those aside Best Wordle Words comes in at 1,008.