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Word of the Day: The snowball effect
Well, isn’t this timely?
Winter is the best time of year to talk about snowballs, and by pure coincidence, I’ve chosen the snowball effect for my post today.
Now, I could wax nostalgic about building snow forts, igloos and tunnelling through huge snowbanks when I was a kid, but the snowball effect has a more significant meaning than that.
It’s not all fun and games, you know.
The snowball effect occurs when a situation becomes bigger and bigger, faster and faster.
Imagine making a small snowball and then rolling it around to create a snowman.
The little snowball will become bigger and bigger until you cannot roll it around anymore.
You may think it’s a bit too much, but especially after Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s, even snowmen tend to be more rolly-polly than usual.
To get back to adult reality, when a situation grows out of your control, it’s often referred to as the snowball effect.
The idea that addiction begins with tobacco, moves on to marijuana, then heroin, etc., is a negative example of the snowball effect.
We’re getting too close to Christmas to dwell on the negatives, though, so let’s look at a positive example – reading.
When most of my students first became my students, they were a little leery of reading.
They didn’t like it.
However, the more you read, there’s a snowball effect: the more you like it the easier it becomes.
As you read more, you learn more, and as you learn more, you want to know more, so you read more and on and on, it rolls.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 7th-grade education (age 12).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 72.
The higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100, the easier the passage is to read.