Does Microsoft Word Have Literary Judgment?

Janice Harayda, proprietor of One-Minute Book Reviews, former books editor at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and vice-president of the National Book Critics Circle , does NOT like Lloyd Jones’s Booker Prize-front-runner, Mister Pip.  The nub of her complaint: Jones writes for third-grade readers.  Here’s her evidence:

How do I know? I once edited books for a test-prep company and, after finishing Mister Pip, realized that its reading level was much lower that of many books I had edited for elementary-school students. So I entered a page of Jones’s text into my computer, ran the Flesch-Kincaid readability statistics that are part of the spell-checker on Microsoft Word, and got a grade level of 4.4 for it. To see if the passage was typical, I entered two later pages and got even lower grade levels, 3.1 and 3.5, an average of 3.6 for the novel. I also entered text from another finalist, On Chesil Beach (grade 8.6), and the past winners listed below with their reading levels.

I have to say that I wonder about this methodology.  Reviewers have usually noted that Jones’s simplicity is deceptive, that, like Conrad, he’s achieving a variety of effects with tone (here’s one of many who make this claim).  Such effects would, necessarily, not show up on the Flesch-Kincaid stats. 

For example: if you reproduce the experiment with May Sinclair’s masterpiece, The Life and Death of Harriet Frean, you’ll also get odd numbers.  For example, chapter 2 is apparently written at a 2nd-grade reading level.  Now, no second grader on this earth could make heads or tails of Sinclair. 

Later on, Harayda claims that:

He can’t be trying to imitate Great Expectations, because a page from Charles Dickens’s novel registered a grade level of 10.7

But this really does compare apples with limes.  Victorian expectations of prose were so different from modern ones.  The idea that one needed the equivalent of a modern 10th-grade education to grasp Dickens just doesn’t mesh with the reality of 19th literacy practices.

Mister Pip may well not be the best choice for the Booker Prize--I’ve not read all the finalists, and so can’t say anything with confidence--but this is a remarkably thin objection (especially since Harayda ties Lloyd Jones’s stylistic choices to racial assumptions!).  Plus, it makes my head hurt to think that Microsoft Word’s grammar checker--the bane of English professors everywhere--could play any role in literary judgment.

—Jason B. Jones