Does anyone in this forum use the Flesch Kincaid (F-K) Grade Level tests or other 'reading ease' tool on their documentation? To what purpose and with what effect? Does anyone know of any objective measure for 'plain English' other than the 'crystal mark'?

As someone recently returned to consultancy, I am determined that clients should recognise our work as being written in simple, plain English. I am considering a requirement in our SLAs that none of our reports will be above F-K grade level 14. My own output is hitting this as a personal target although I've had to rethink and edit some of my documents. I think this could be an objectively measurable USP.

I have been reviewing a number of documents on behalf of clients. It is difficult to pass judgement on 'readability' without seeming to be incredibly patronising and hyper-critical (and perhaps touting for further business). The Flesch Kincaid test gives objective evidence of what I am complaining of. I am genuinely appalled at how obscure and convoluted the language in much of the documentation can be. Unfortunately much of it has been prepared by H&S consultants. Some 'induction leaflets' and policy documents are written in language so painfully twisted the authors probably couldn't understand it themselves. I certainly couldn't! Most of it is written in legalese rather than English, and the rest just appears to be gibberish.

These H&S consultants have charged for documents their clients could not possibly hope to understand. I would like to post excerpts on here from some of the worst documents (in hopes the authors would recognise their own work and be ashamed) but I suspect the mods would feel obliged to step in very quickly.

For anyone who cares to know – this posting achieves grade level of 9.6 according to MS Word…

If anyone is using this type of analysis - I'd really like to hear your experiences.

Thanks, Steve

I'm not sure what I did - but in MS-Word is doing it for me....

Its under the 'spelling and grammar' checker (it needed something tweaked which I found in the online 'help' section) and it does the job fairly simply. My only real concern is that it gives me the statistics, but I'm not sufficiently knowledgeable to check the numbers... It may be lying and giving me a big dose of garbage.

Steve

Maybe it's because I started out as a scientist but I write a lot in the passive (x was observed, etc) rather than the active (I saw x, etc.) Otherwise, I think I write in clear English.
For many years, I reviewed reports from others for the standard of English as well as the technical content.

LB

What's an SLA?

Sorry John: SLA="Service Level Agreement" (What we will do for the money you pay us - how much, how often, how quick...)

Bob: Your legal friends may be risk averse - But I don't think that helps people to understand what they are saying. My clients need, want and deserve (and pay for) direct answers to direct questions. (I could say the same about politicians but thats an argument for another day)

Kieran:
I appreciate your concern, but I don’t think I am in any danger of confusing the documents I have reviewed with either ‘good’ or ‘ideal’. There may be some room for argument over whether they are “awful” or just “very bad”.

As example the following sentence appears as the first paragraph of an induction booklet intended for issue to all new starts. The business employs predominantly low grade manual labour and has a largely immigrant workforce:

“As an employer we are required to retained personal information pertaining to your employment, we endeavour and are fully committed to meet our legal obligations to ensure your Health and Safety at Work and to meet the requirements of the Data Protection Act 1998 in the obtaining, retention, use, access, disclosure and final disposal of said information.”

Inductees are expected to sign to accept they have been issued with and understand the booklet. I think it means “We need you to give us some information about yourself. We will be careful with the information you give us. We think your safety is important”. But I’m not entirely certain. I think any claim of unlawful discrimination is more likely to come from someone who has been asked to sign this but doesn’t have a chance of understanding it than it is from my own comments.

And the following excerpt is the first paragraph from a health and safety policy for a school…
“The Board of Governors notes the provisions of the Health and Safety at Work, etc Act 1974 which states that it is the duty of every employer to conduct his or her business in such a way as to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, that persons who are not in his or her employment but who may be affected by it are not exposed to risks to their health and safety, and accepts that it has a responsibility to take all reasonably practicable steps to secure the health and safety of pupils, staff and others using the school premises or participating in school-sponsored activities.”

I could observe that the wording is excessively obscure and convoluted – or I could comment that with an F-K Grade Level of 44.3 it will be impenetrable to virtually all the UK population. The first sounds like snobbery (inverted snobbery?) the second suggests a more objective analysis and is likely to be more acceptable to a client whose documents I am criticising. (Or I could offer a redraft that is written in simple, plain English – but a full re-write of a sixty page document will take a lot of time the client may not be willing to pay for…)

I understand the need for ‘well designed, simple research projects’. Until they have been done (by the academics who do these things) I need something that is available now, is easy to use, and gives me a simple, practical measure to assess the clarity and ‘simplicity’ of documents we produce or review. The US Naval research that led to the Flesch Kincaid Grade Level offerings may not satisfy a UK academic but it is good enough for me until something better comes along.

As food for thought, perhaps, the text from your posting achieves a grade level score of 19.5 according to my MS word analysis. That equates (very, very roughly) to being comprehensible to someone with 19.5 years schooling. Postdoctoral academics aside – there are very few people in the UK workforce who have been in education that long. Most of us need to communicate effectively and efficiently with a general population who struggle to read or understand anything much above grade level 12 – and some even lower.

Bottom line for me is that I believe we (the health and safety profession) need to act as "interpreters" of the standards and laws for people without the benefit of our education and training. We should not simply regurgitate the same old legal phrases (so far as is reasonably practicable, suitable and sufficient, where necessary for reasons of health and safety) all the time. My experience has shown me time and time again that when we do this people simply switch off and do not understand!

Steve

Steve

It's far, far from academic to comply with The Equality Act 2010

Is that simple enough,sir?

Steve, this is a fascinating post. We have to reach our audience, and the audience at the end of the day has to applaud, it's not a lot of use if they can't understand the script though.

I try and write my documents in plain English and I encourage (OK, brutally compel ;-)) my team to do the same but still, still. I found a FOG checking site online (couldn't get the FK thing to work on my laptop, I think the on-demand spell-check may have been turned off by our IT people) and put all our guidance documents through it. And guess what, we are asking for sixth form or better education for almost all our documents, and this in the care/charity retail sectors which are notoriously low paid low-entry sectors. Quite a puzzler really, we will just have to do better,

John

Kieran:

In terms of the Equality Act - I would maintain that it is objectively justifiable to insist that all appointees for a role must be able to understand the safety information and the written instructions they are given. If we translate documents into foreign languages to make them understandable to foreign speaking applicants - then we risk actually discriminating against english-speaking applicants (not a protected characteristic, but likely to raise eyeborws at least) if our 'English Language' versions are incomprehensible to the english speaking audience.

If we dont translate the documents (if we insist that reading and understanding English is objectively justifiable for safety reasons) then I believe there is far less chance of being accused of unlawful discrimination if the language we use is kept as simple as possible.

Interesting subject. I didn't think it would generate so much discussion.

Steve

It seems I have the same problems as Leadbelly. Whilst I aspire to plain language and use of active sentences, a lifetime of writing engineering specifications and technical documents is a hard habit to break.
I like to think I'm getting better, but it certainly isn't easy!
Problems tend to be compounded where we try Peer Review - our Peers tend to have the same mind-set!

Steve this is a great topic, and well done for your efforts.

Your comment about understanding is dead on - if we write something technically beautiful and legally robust we've just wasted our time if our audience can't understand it.

Amongst the reminders, cheat-sheets and charts on my office wall is a copy of that great Einstein quote:

"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."

Communication is vital in our various roles. If we make written documents designed to be understood without additional coaching we better be damn sure people can make sense of them! I know exactly how you feel reading some of these impenetrable monsters.

Good luck

And what about those who do not read nor write? This situation arrises a lot in some areas so the only way is some sort of verbal etc. communication system

I totally agree that there is significant scope to improve the quality of written work. I can see that reading grade measures have a role, but we have to accept that it is not the full picture.

It has already been said, but a key element is considering what the end user needs. There seems to be an aim to always include everything detail, and this means our documents inevitably get longer and less readable. The reality is that in some circumstances end users need very simple documentation on a subject, whilst others will require and can deal with more detail.

I think this video on Youtube gives a very amusing illustration of how messages can get over complicated -

Anybody tried using the Plain English Campaign 'drivel defence' tool? It looks interesting...

http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/drivel-defence.html

But my work pc won't allow Javascript to open new windows - so I can't load it... If its worth doing though I may be able to persuade my network admin to allow changes...

Any drivel defence users out there?