I’m about to start with the final submission process. I’m going to go through the thesis a couple more times, check my bibliography, fill out the forms, pay the fees, and then submit.
Just out of curiosity, I generated new readability test scores just like I did in July. This time I got:
Total sentences: 819 (was 1534) Total words: 12106 (was 18006) Average words per Sentence: 14.78 (was 11.74) Words with 1 Syllable: 7551 (was 11817) Words with 2 Syllables: 2444 (was 3377) Words with 3 Syllables: 1292 (was 1697) Words with 4 or more Syllables: 819 (was 1115) Percentage of word with three or more syllables: 17.44% (was 15.62%) Average Syllables per Word: 1.62 (1.56) Gunning Fog Index: 12.89 (was 10.94) Flesch Reading Ease: 54.92 (was 62.79) Flesch-Kincaid Grade: 9.27 (was 7.42)
It’s obvious that the number of words and sentences decreased quite dramatically. I’ve cut a few sections from my thesis, but not that much. This time, I spent more time removing listings and other text that wasn’t formatted properly in the text version of my thesis used for these readability tests. I’m pretty sure that bad formatting must have caused the July scores to be off.
I’m quite happy about the Flesch Reading Ease score. It’s recommended that authors keep it in the 60-70 range. According to my Gunning Fog Index, my writing has also graduated from the “Times, Newsweek” category to the “Wall Street Journal” ;)
