Sparkling with wit, Jane Austen's graceful style is even more reader-friendly than the language of newspapers.
So are the first chapters of literary classics like David Copperfield and Sons and Lovers. They are all easier to read than newspapers.
That's what I found in a readability test that looked at the number of words in a sentence and whether the words were long or short.
You can check the test results for newspapers and magazines like The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker and The Economist in my previous post.
Click on the slideshow to see the readability scores for the first chapters of:
- Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice,
- Thackeray's Vanity Fair,
- Dickens' David Copperfield,
- George Eliot's Middlemarch,
- Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd,
- Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim,
- Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles,
- Kipling's Kim,
- EM Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread, and
- DH Lawrence's Sons and Lovers.