I analysed 5 titans of literature with Yoast SEO and the results are hilarious.

Upon completing the most spectacularly lucid section of prose that my fingers have ever battered into a keyboard, I look across to the Yoast SEO box and see “Readability: Needs improvement’.

My heart drifts south into my belly as these words cut through my soul. A few amendments upgrade the rating to ‘OK’.

BUT I PUT EVERY FIBRE OF MY LITERARY SELF INTO THIS!!!

This phenomenon is all too common unless I pretend to write for a five year old, which seems to be the intellectual level of the internet these days.

To prove my point, I’ve taken excerpts from five titans of literature to see what they can achieve in Yoast readability scores. The utterly hilarious results are below.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The epic poem by Mr Coleridge tells of a ship cursed by an albatross in a mighty six-hundred and twenty-six lines. Who would have known that nearly two hundred years after writing, the albatross of Yoast readability would be branding the work as needing improvement?