According to the Blog Readability Test, my blog has a high school reading level. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not. Part of me feels that I need to work harder to obfuscate my writing lest someone question my academic credentials.

Of course it could just be the algorithm. I presume that this site is using something similar to the Unix style command. When I run my ten most recent items (not all of which are on the front page) through style, I get the following results:

readability grades:
Kincaid: 9.2

In his review of Beowulf, Richard Nokes complains in passing of the pronunciation of scop. I presume he's referring to the initial consonant cluster rather than the quality of the vowel, which one could also complain about, although I think that's too subtle a difference to be really annoying.

A cute review of Beowulf in verse at Slate.

It would have been more impressive if the writer had tried to do it in alliterative verse.

In fact, that's one of the things that bugged me about the bawdy songs that are sung in the hall in the movie. They're in ordinary rhyming song meter with nary an alliterating half-line to be found.

In the movie Beowulf, The scop's oration during the "Beowulf Day" celebration is a bastardized version of Beowulf's fight with Grendel from the poem. It's a snippet of what we originally recorded, which managed to tell the whole fight, from Grendel coming off the moor to Beowulf raising Grendel's arm in victory in about 90 seconds.

I saw a screening of Beowulf last week but have been holding off commenting on it until it opened. I am not planning to post a review (since I worked on the film, I wouldn't exactly be objective) but I did want to make a few remarks on the use of language.

A few weeks back, I was interviewed for an article on Beowulf in the L.A. Times that has just appeared.

I do want to point out that my remarks were paraphrased (as is fairly common with journalists), and so there are a few places where what I intended may not have been rendered quite accurately.

While poking around in Google Books, I have just discovered that the wonderful Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage is available in full text mode. As far as I'm concerned, this is one of the few really worthwhile usage guides. Unlike most of the bozos who opine about how you should or should not write, the Merriam-Webster's folks actually look to see how reputable writers actually use language instead of just spouting off based on their personal whims, and they show a deep knowledge about the variety of opinion on various points of usage.

In high school my favorite English teacher was Mrs. Stephens. She was strict, demanded quality writing, and rarely gave A's. And I still remember many of the little usage rules that she insisted on. In my maturity, however, I realize that she taught us many arbitrary rules that have little foundation in reality.

Heidi Harley has noted the presence of Steve Kowit's poem "The Grammar Lesson" on the Poetry 180 site. This is a nice poem, but my favorite poem with a grammar theme is Kenneth Koch's "Permanently".

This is the one that opens,

One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.

I haven't written more installments in my series lambasting the College Board recently, but the following may prompt me to continue sooner rather than later. (I have a lot more to say about useless explanations.) I have discovered what appears to be an error on an operational test question. In other words, this question counted towards the scores of all students who took this particular test.

The May 2007 SAT. Section 6, question 24 has the following question:

After the uprising of October 10, 1911, that has led to the establishment of a Chinese republic, many Chinese Americans decided to return to China in hopes of a bright future there. No error

Do you see the problem?