Readability

Sometime back in January or so of freshman year, a friend and I came up with the basic ideas for a thriller/romance novel. She spammed me with a list of character names, and in a few weeks and multiple pages of outlining (which are now safely sealed in a plastic sleeve), I sketched out the underlying structure of the (to date) biggest writing project of my life: SQuared.

SQuared took me three years to write (freshman - junior year of high school) and I literally finished editing it a few weeks ago. The proof copy is now sitting on the shelf in my dorm at Hopkins, the novel officially available online at amazon.com
It was an exciting project, something that was massive in complexity, thoroughly researched, and painstakingly edited. I invested such immense amounts of time into that thing.

And then I come across this website (when I should be writing my half of a 30 page paper for JHUMUNC): online-utility.org. It's a site that takes the numbers and measures the readability of your work. So I copy and paste the SQuared manuscript, all 150 pages of it, into the little box.
Here's what it spat back at me:
Number of characters (without spaces) : 375,231.00
Number of words : 83,695.00
Number of sentences : 8,758.00
Average number of characters per word : 4.48
Average number of syllables per word : 1.43
Average number of words per sentence: 9.56

Indication of the number of years of formal education that a person requires in order to easily understand the text on the first reading
Gunning Fog index : 6.25

Approximate representation of the U.S. grade level needed to comprehend the text :
Coleman Liau index : 7.47
Flesch Kincaid Grade level : 5.00
ARI (Automated Readability Index) : 4.46
SMOG : 7.94
Flesch Reading Ease : 76.27

List of sentences which we suggest you should consider to rewrite to improve readability of the text : (a list of basically half the dialogue in the book).

I'm not sure if there's a problem with the fact that I write at a 5th - 7th grade level. But hey, I'm doing ok on my English papers, and I still got a solid A on my history paper, so for the time being I'm going to go out on a limb here and make the claim that I can write. If nothing else, I wrote 84,000 words in one word document.