Bwog has been experimenting with Google Docs, the friendly and clean web-based word processor, (really the West Side Market of word processors). It seems that under the “Word Count” feature, the program will tell you the grade-level equivalent of your writing. We played around with this feature using some of our favorite theorists, celebrities, novelists, and lolcats!


“A civilization that proves itself incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization.” – Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism (Grade level: 15)

“Nurture an appetite for being puzzled, for being confused, indeed for being openly stupid, and that – despite what you may think – is very difficult…We all know the cliche’ that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. It is also true that a lot of knowledge can be a dangerous thing as well…use your ignorance as well as your knowledge for creative means.”- Lee C. Bollinger (Grade level: 3)

“The other did not move, jackknifed backward between the two bunks, grave and clean, the cigar burning smoothly and richly in his clean and steady hand, the smoke wreathing upward across his face saturnine, humorless and calm.”- William Faulkner, Old Man (Grade level: 4)

“I can has cheezburger?”- lolcat (Grade level: 2)

“Passing from an implosion to an explosion in a chain of sounds produces a peculiar effect that marks the syllabic boundary.”- Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (Grade level: 5)

“Most people only think of Mitchell as the guitar-strumming folkie that she was in the late ’60s, but her music has been moving through several phases since the mid-’70s, and Shine sums up some of the best elements of each.”- Columbia Daily Spectator (Grade level: 2)

“After days of debate, a motley pride of unlikely revolutionaries–bearded politicos, earnest academics, and multigrained environmentalists– collected their cigarettes and left Kasparov’s apartment, divided and worn out.” – David Remnick, this week’s New Yorker (Grade level: 13)

“Whoa! Jennifer Aniston and Ben Affleck’s Hot Chemistry.” – cover of this week’s US Weekly (Grade level: 7)

– JNW