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Thursday, December 08, 2005
Tool for better writing
From the Department of You Learn Something New Everyday.
What makes a good writer? For starters, how about getting an idea or a point across with as few words and syllables as possible.
Mike Durant, an editor with the California Department of Water Resources, has some advice for a quick and inexpensive way to determine how hard or how easy any writing is to read. He writes in Capitol Weekly, a "newspaper of California government and politics:"
What if there was software to measure writing? There is. It's called the Flesch Readability Ease (FRE) test. Both MS Word and Corel's Wordperfect include the FRE test. ("Get me rewrite.")
Durant lists some modern and historic documents he scored using FRE in Microsoft Word. He also points to his website, CalClarity, for a more extensive list of scored documents. CalClarity appears to have the following mission:
Cal Clarity is an effort to educate California government executives about the value of communicating clearly to their primary audience – all Californians. The public has a right to understand what their government is doing. Unclear, obtuse writing deprives people access to their government.
Also, "plain, straightforward language" is required by state law: California Government Code 6219.
While Durant gives instructions for Microsoft Word, he admits to not knowing how to find FRE scores in WordPerfect. I did a little poking around and discovered the following:
- In the main menu bar, click Tools
- In the list of choices, click Grammatik
- On the far righthand side, click Options
- From the choices, click Analysis
- From those choices, click Readability
That brings up the following window which compares the current document to a Hemmingway short story. A dropdown menu at the top gives the Gettysburg Address and 1040EZ instructions as the other default choices. There is also a button to Add Document.
There are four scores, none of which are specifically labeled "Flesch Readability Ease:"
- Flesch-Kincaid grade level (for obvious reasons, Durant suggests ignoring that)
- Passive voice (% of verb phrases);
- Sentence complexity (100 = very complex); and
- Vocabulary complexity (100 = very complex).
It appears WordPerfect counts 100 as being very complex. According to the Corel documentation, "the Readability report estimates the amount of skill required for a reader to understand a document." This is contrary to the scores provided in MS Word, where a score of 100 would mean 100% of people can understand it, according to Durant. I suppose that would be consistent with the FRE scoring system.
However, there does appear to be some value here in grading documents for readability. Play around with this. Compare your own writings to that of your local newspaper or favorite magazine columns. I would like to have known about this at my last job where English was my boss's second language.
• Posted by: Marie Carnes at 11:54 AM
• 460 words in this article
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• Filed in: Tips - WordPerfect
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