Top Cryptocurrencies Rated by White Paper Complexity

Studying the correlation between the readability of white papers and the money raised.

Reza Jafery
The Startup
Published in
7 min readJul 4, 2019

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I recently discovered the Hemingway Editor App, and it’s slowly changing how I view “good” writing.

Hemingway’s most popular novels are written in a 4th-6th grade reading level.

If you inspect other genres, you’ll find that as a rule of thumb; writing is more successful the more simple it is. (source)

The Hemingway Editor scores your writing based on how simple it is to understand. Your score reflects the, “lowest education needed to understand your prose”.

They explain why you want to score as low as possible in this excerpt:

Writing that scores at a 15th grade level is not better than writing at an 8th grade level. In fact, a high grade level often means it is confusing and tedious for any reader. Worse, it’s likely filled with jargon. After all, unless you’re writing a textbook (and even then) you don’t want it to sound like a textbook.[source]

Articles from GQ clock in around a 6th grade reading level. Whereas Buzzfeed articles — which are shared more than GQ articles — are at a 3rd grade level.

It makes sense when you think about the fact that only 50% of Americans can read at an 8th grade level. Even more sense when you notice a mere 15–20% of

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Reza Jafery
The Startup

Ops @ PubDAO / Community @ Reflexer / Product @ Decrypt. Trying to change the rules and create a positive sum game.