If you handed someone a blank sheet of paper and the only thing written on it was the page’s title, would they understand what the title meant? Would they have a clear idea of what the actual document might be about? If so, then congratulations! You just passed the Blank Sheet of Paper Test for page titles because your title was descriptive.
The Blank Sheet of Paper Test (BSoPT)[1] is an idea Ian Lurie has talked about a lot over the years, and recently on his new website[2]. It’s a test to see if what you’ve written has meaning to someone who has never encountered your brand or content before. In Ian’s words, "Will this text, written on a blank sheet of paper, make sense to a stranger?" The Blank Sheet of Paper Test is about clarity without context.
But what if we’re performing the BSoPT on a machine instead of a person? Does our thought experiment still apply? I think so. Machines can’t read—even sophisticated ones like Google and Bing. They can only guess at the meaning of our content, which makes the test especially relevant.
I have an alternative version of the BSoPT, but for machines: If all a machine could see is a list of words that appear in a document and how often, could it reasonably guess what the document is about?
The Blank Sheet of Paper Test for word frequency
If you handed someone a blank sheet of paper and the only thing written on it was this table of words and frequencies, could they guess what the article is about?
An article about sharpening a knife is a pretty good guess. The article I took this word frequency table from was a how-to guide for sharpening a