Puritan Author Reading Difficulty Chart?
Odd question for everybody:
I'm looking for a resource (or web site) that had some kind of rating for the difficulty level of different puritans (church fathers and reformers would be awesome too if you've seen it out there). I'm hoping for something pretty comprehensive rather than just a couple authors named. Has anyone ever heard of such a thing? Some kind of database or chart that shows puritan authors and their difficulty level?
My goal here is to set up a way to rate puritan writings on a weighted scale that measures reviews, number of ratings (popularity), and difficulty level (but prioritizing reviews). I'd love to have a Puritan reading list starting from most impactful and easiest to read, to more obscure and difficult to read. This way as one grew in reading ability they'd grow in the difficulty of writing they'd experience. I can get almost all the info I need for this from Goodreads.com. I can even export it into a handy excel spread sheet. The only data I can't find is some kind of difficulty scale.
Anyone heard of such a thing?
Thank you!
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Never heard of anything like it, but sounds like it could be useful.
Part of the problem is that it's subjective, to at least some extent.
Thomas Watson is often held up as an example of an easier-to-read Puritan. Presumably Bunyan too. Flavel maybe intermediate and Owen at the harder end?
It would be interesting if you could ask a couple of people who are very familiar with the Puritans eg Joel Beeke, Sinclair Ferguson etc who they would put in each category.
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The book "Meet the Puritans" is a really excellent read that covers much of what you are looking for, but not in chart form.
https://www.logos.com/product/48977/meet-the-puritans
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I've not heard one , but I would put John Owen (not a puritan, I know) on the hardest end of the spectrum.
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Everett Headley said:
John Owen (not a puritan, I know)
Don't tell whoever wrote the book 'John Owen: The Prince of Purtians'!
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This made me happy when I read it the other day: How John Owen Proposed To His Wife
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In my defense I had the flu and should not have been on the internet.... But, I meant to type something else and I don't know why that came out. lol . I feel like the kid on the first day of class and forgot his pants. oh well.
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Thanks guys! I also found an article by Joel Beeke where he lists a few difficult ones and a few easier ones. I think part of the difficulty in this is that different puritans can be difficult or easy depending on what they're writing. Edwards for example I find difficult in his larger treatises, but his sermons or miscellanies I find relatively easy. Working on the list though! I'll post the top ten or so when I'm finished! (Even if my difficulty scale may be a bit arbitrary!)
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The Prince of Puritans John Owen
Good find. I might get it.
mm.
Stephen Steele said:Everett Headley said:John Owen (not a puritan, I know)
Don't tell whoever wrote the book 'John Owen: The Prince of Purtians'!
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Liam said:
Some kind of database or chart that shows puritan authors and their difficulty level?
This is simple. Make a chart with spaces from 1 (easiest) to 10 (most difficult). Put them all in 10.
Done.
[:D]
Eating a steady diet of government cheese, and living in a van down by the river.
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Joel Beeke has written an excellent article here: http://equip.sbts.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/SBJT-V14-N4_Beeke.pdf
Apologies if someone has already highlighted this.
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Scott Cameron said:
Joel Beeke has written an excellent article here: http://equip.sbts.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/SBJT-V14-N4_Beeke.pdf
Apologies if someone has already highlighted this.
Thank you so much, Scott for mentioning this article. I would look at Owen bits, and sigh. Now I know where to start.
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Tim Challies did a very helpful series in 2013 on the Puritans :-)
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Also in Logos is the Magazine "Credo" Volume 5 Number 4, the title is "THE PRINCE OF PURITANS - John Owen. It has a number of good articles on John Owen, for 1.99
https://www.logos.com/product/158391/credo-volume-5-issue-4-the-prince-of-puritans-john-owen
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Tony Reinke also has a series of posts about the Puritans on his blog
https://tonyreinke.com/2007/02/07/the-puritan-study-series-index/
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Liam said:
I'm looking for a resource (or web site) that had some kind of rating for the difficulty level of different puritans (church fathers and reformers would be awesome too if you've seen it out there).
Go through a list of Puritan authors and, one by one, copy and paste the text from a sample book by each author into one of various online readability calculators (e.g., https://www.online-utility.org/english/readability_test_and_improve.jsp) and compile the results into a table. Share here.
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Liam said:
Wow Rosie! What an excellent idea! Thank you!
You're welcome. And you can probably get a pretty good read on the difficulty level of a book by just copying/pasting about one chapter worth, assuming that most authors are fairly consistent in their writing style throughout their works. So you won't need to take forever at this, or violate any fair use limitations on the Logos software (I think there's a maximum percentage or number of pages from each book that you can copy, though I've never tested this).
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I made an Excel Spreadsheet which might help.
It normalizes each element, multiplies the z-score by its weight and then adds it up (high is good for ratings and popularity, it is bad for reading grade level), so once you were done, you could sort by that column from low to high to get a ranking, based on your weights. If you use the Internet Archive, you can get .txt files of most of these books, and just copy and paste that URL into the readability site that Rosie mentioned. I would not personally invest much more time in it than I already have, because those automatic reading difficulty tools rely only on word and sentence length. Unfamiliar words are the issue with the Puritans more than those factors.
Using Logos as a pastor, seminary professor, and Tyndale author
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