[recommendation] High Gunning fog index of website description

[Maxim-Mazurok]

It's more of general issue. I think that it might be a good idea to check texts used on this website against SMOG, Gunning fog index or any other readability formulas, because it's meant to be understandable for kids and undergrads.

For example, the description that shows up at google: https://github.com/LLK/scratch-www/blob/55f4b5b92ab2b6a1e3e0c060140383470473e2ef/src/template-config.js#L17-L19 has the gunning fog index of 16 (source), which is equal to "College senior" reading level.

Based on a couple of other formulas, this text is rated, as

Reading Level: difficult to read. Reader's Age: 21-22 yrs. old (college level)

which is still too high for kids that want to start exploring programming languages.

Some of difficult words are: "language", "community", "interactive" and "animations" (source)

So, I'm marking that issue as a recommendation for whoever creates texts, to keep that in mind, hope it makes sense.

Let me know if anyone will be interested in running some automated tests to detect difficult words, I'll be happy to help.

[towerofnix]

(Disclaimer - I'm not part of the Scratch Team - I'm just curious about this topic.)

Some of difficult words are: "language", "community", "interactive" and "animations"

Of course...but then, those are the key words, aren't they? Obviously you have a lot more experience with rewriting strings than me, but - how would you suggest that particular text be written, while still conveying the same effect?

Also, I know these formulas must have been greatly scrutinized and developed to give useful information, but... well, I'm not convinced. Call it blasphemy for me to argue a formula with my own human perspective, but those don't seem like very complex words, and especially with the context of the full string, they have very obvious meanings. Even if you're a very young kid and you don't know exactly what some of those words mean, you could probably still make quite reasonable guesses.

You also mention "undergrads" - which... well, I'm extra confused now, because those words seem like they would be in the vocabulary of anybody over, say, seven years old. If you've spoken English, they seem like basically given knowledge! Even the technical words like "interactive" and "animation" are probably well-defined in the minds of anyone who's spent more than twenty minutes on the internet - and, if they aren't, you'd certainly learn them after browsing the Scratch site for more than five.

PS, what is the goal here? Are we trying to make a tagline that is easier for anyone to understand on google - since that's the example you gave - or are we trying to reduce the language knowledge barrier? (To whom? Very, very young children? "Undergrads?" People whose native language isn't English? - I'll point out that Scratch and its editor both are capable of switching between languages.) Either way, I'd claim the barrier is already near zero, per my discussion above.

[Maxim-Mazurok]

First of all, I'd like to say that I love idea of Scratch, recommend it to kids and parents, created an android app using advanced Scratch and I believe that visual programming is the future of professional software development. So, I really appreciate efforts behind creating the Scratch and would never criticize it in a bad way. All that I said, was a couple of thoughts about how those formulas that I recently learned about, may be applied to make Scratch ecosystem even better for newcomers and young kids. That's the point, no criticism, just objective ideas backed by the facts and sources.

And I don't think that I have more experience in rewriting strings than @towerofnix, especially because English is not my native language.

So, back to the constructive dialog. Those words, used in description, are keywords indeed. And I can't be sure about how Google search engine works, but from what I know about SEO, you can put keywords in the <meta name="keywords"> tag, instead of description. But I also heard that that tag's value is overrated or even less then description value in terms of SEO... So, can't really say anything about it.

About rephrasing, we can take a look at the description from scratchjr.org:

With ScratchJr, young children (ages 5-7) can program their own interactive stories and games.

It has the Gunning Fog Index of 8.457, which is almost twice lower than description from scratch.mit.edu. So, it may be a good starting point.

About the formulas perfection, obviously, they are not perfect. Especially on small chunks of text, I think. There's a whole section of Wikipedia about Gunning Fog Index Limitations. And they explicitly state, that "Not all complex words are difficult". So you might think of it, as a spell checker. Sometimes it gives you false positives, but sometimes it helps you to catch a typo. And I'd like to think of those formulas, as of assistant, that is not a direct source of truth, but rather a helper for a human being that writes texts and knows words. Formulas don't know words and how widely they are used. So yes, I can agree with you, that those 4 words are not difficult from my perspective either. But I don't know much about writing English texts for kids.. So the least that I can do - is to bring ideas for those who know and try to help them from technical perspective.

About "undergrads", I might not used that word correctly, since I'm not a native speaker. What I meant, is that formula gave a result "Reader's Age: 21-22 yrs. old (college level)". And I assumed that "college level" is above "undergrads". I might be wrong here, sorry.

And, let me say about the goal one more time. It's not about the tagline, it's just an example. The goal here, is to bring to the attention of text authors, that there are formulas that might help to check the texts for accidental usage of difficult words, no matter in which part of the website. I agree, that the barrier is already really low, but it might be a good idea to automate the process of keeping it that way.

[thisandagain]

/cc @ntlrsk @kosiecki17 @carljbowman @kathymakes