Flesching it out

Posted: July 10 2009 by Steve Doyle in People

What if you could meas­ure the read­ab­il­ity of your organisation’s writ­ten com­mu­nic­a­tions as sci­en­tific­ally as you meas­ure web­site hits or tele­phone responses?

Many of Iris’s cli­ents are big pub­lic sec­tor organ­isa­tions, gov­ern­ment depart­ments and national brands with a need for simple, straight­for­ward com­mu­nic­a­tions that are eas­ily under­stood by just about any­one. And the key to achiev­ing that is well-written, read­able copy.

Sounds so easy doesn’t it? But what does ‘read­able’ actu­ally mean? Exactly whose idea of ‘read­able’ are we talk­ing about? What’s read­able to one per­son can have the next reader flounder­ing amidst its man­i­fold poly­syl­lables (see what I did there?). Wouldn’t it be handy if there were a simple way of object­ively meas­ur­ing the read­ab­il­ity of your organisation’s writ­ten com­mu­nic­a­tions? Well, there is. In fact, it’s been right under your nose, or more pre­cisely your mouse but­ton, all the time.

A tip I picked up on a Plain Eng­lish course was to use the in-built Read­ab­il­ity Score in Word. Tucked away in the options but­ton inside Spelling and Gram­mar in the Tools drop-down menu there’s a tick box option called ‘Show read­ab­il­ity stat­ist­ics’. Click that, and every time you run a Spelling and Gram­mar check in Word, you’ll auto­mat­ic­ally get a Flesch score for that bit of copy. Who knew that little gem of a tool was there?

The Flesch Read­ing Ease Test cal­cu­lates the num­ber of words, sen­tences and syl­lables to give you a read­ab­il­ity score. A high score indic­ates a more read­able piece of copy, a lower score marks pas­sages that are more dif­fi­cult to read. Reader’s Digest magazine has a read­ab­il­ity index of about 65, Time magazine scores around 52, an aver­age year 7 student’s (eleven years) writ­ten assign­ment has a read­ab­il­ity test of 60 – 70 (and a read­ing grade level of 6 – 7) and the Har­vard Law Review has a gen­eral read­ab­il­ity score in the low 30s. The highest (easi­est) score pos­sible is around 120.

Rudolf Flesch, who wanted to cre­ate a for­mula that authors of school text­books could use to meas­ure their read­ab­il­ity, inven­ted the test way back in the 1940s. How­ever, it still has its place because the prin­ciples of good, simple, access­ible writ­ing are the same today as they were then. Keep sen­tences short. Use short words rather than longer ones…. and… well, that’s about all there is to it really.

Try it on some of your business’s words. It can be very enlight­en­ing. Espe­cially if you dis­cover you’ve been spend­ing huge amounts of mar­ket­ing spend cre­at­ing cus­tomer com­mu­nic­a­tions that only Stephen Hawk­ing can understand.

Of course, it’s not the Holy Grail of writ­ing. And – copy­writers every­where heave a big sigh of relief — it won’t actu­ally write the words for you. But it’s another handy last minute san­ity check that helps you root out pass­ive or long sen­tences and gen­er­ally get a more object­ive meas­ure of your use of words. And just in case you were won­der­ing, these words have a read­ab­il­ity score of 59.7 and there are 33 sen­tences, with 522 words (15.82 per sen­tence) made up of 809 syl­lables (1.55 per word).