This is a transcript of one of the videos in the plain language training course Writing well at work. There are references to slides and visual material that are only available by viewing the video.
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Some things to do before your document leaves your desk
I’d like to turn our minds now to how can we refine our documents, to make sure it’s as good as it can be.
Firstly, there’s a number of things that I think you can do before the document leaves your desk. We can read it out aloud. We can run a readability test. We can think about style. We can think about layouts and graphics.
Read it out aloud
First idea: Read it out aloud. How difficult is that? It is a really simple thing to do, but it is very valuable. You see, when you read it out aloud, you’ll pick up little errors that you’re likely to miss when you’re just looking at your document on the screen. You see, as you’re massaging your text and you’re changing things from the passive voice into the active voice or changing from nouns into verbs, from time to time, you’ll miss a word or you’ll leave in an extra word. Something like that. And you won’t see it as you are working on the document on the screen, but as you read it out aloud, yes, you’ll find those sorts of errors. So that’s really helpful.
Reading it out aloud will also alert you to sentences that are a little bit too long. If you’ve got to take a breath as you’re reading a sentence, maybe that’s a little bit too long.
It will also tell you how your writing sounds. Good writing sounds good to the ear. Reading it out aloud is a really simple thing to do, but it is a very beneficial check before your document moves somewhere else.
Run a readability test
The next thing to do is to run a readability test on your document. Now there’s a bunch of readability formulas out there that capture how difficult or easy it is to read your text.
One of the most common ones, the one that’s been used most frequently, is a thing called the Flesh-Kincaid grade level.
Now let me tell you roughly how these formula work. What they do is they gather up the number of letters in words, different types of words, number of words in sentences, that type of thing. They put it through an algorithm and out pops a number.
So these types of tests are mechanical indicators only. I would never, ever rely on them on their own because they’re not going to consider context. They’re not going to consider document structure. They’re not going to consider a whole lot of things that are really important if we’re going to write in plain language. But I nearly always use them because they’re quick and simple and free. Why wouldn’t I use them to get a rough indicator of how complex my text?
Now I’m guessing that you might be using Microsoft Word as your writing tool. Inside Microsoft Word there is some readability statistics. I’m sure there’s something similar in other types of programmes as these readability statistics. I’m looking at that second last line there and in this example here I can see the Flesh-Kincade grade level is 9.8. That’s telling me to read this document with some degree of comfort. I would need around about 9.8 years of education, so I’d need to have completed most of high school to be able to read it with some comfort.
Now that’s a little bit higher than I would normally like if a document is going to the public. I think a score of around about 7 to 8 would be better. But in this particular document, I know why it’s scoring a little bit higher. I’ve got a whole lot of chemical compound names in this document, and that’s bumping up the score a little bit higher.
So I’m going to use my judgement. I’ll take on board what this score gives me, but I’ll use my judgement to think through if this is going to be suitable for my reader.
There’s a bunch of other readability programmes out there. There is a website called readable.com that I’ve sometimes used. It’s nice because it gives you an overall rating of ABCD. It also highlights where the problems are, and it will highlight where you’ve got excessively long sentences.
Another example is the Hemingway program. And as artificial intelligence programmes develop, these tools will become more and more available.
Please never rely on these tools on their own, they’re only mechanical indicators giving you a rough idea of how difficult the text is.
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