Thanks, 'Neato! I'll check out the Schonell test.

By the way, I think I solved the problem about the Bob book. The Flesch-Kincaid algorithm is heavily sensitive to the average number of syllables per word. I got a spurious result because the book I was looking at happened to have a few two-syllable names, each of which was used a number of times. In a book with relatively few words, that bumped the grade level much higher than it should have been.

BB