Readability Standards, IQ, and The Fourth Estate

Reading level measurement formulas were developed as a good starting point for considering better writing-not lessor writing. Formulas were developed for newspaper writers and editors in the 1940s; readability research began earlier than that.

World War II reduced newsprint availability and forced thinner papers with more tightly written articles. This is when Robert P. Gunning developed the Fog Index that counted the number of words and the frequency of multisyllabic words within an article. He told his newspaper clients, "Write as you talk ... Why should a police reporter say an accident victim suffered 'contusions and abrasions' when he really means 'cuts and bruises'?" Albeit, to some of us, contusions and abrasions sounds more palatable and we have a variant of publications available to us presenting the same storylines in a multitude of styles for this very reason--personal taste.

The history of readability dates to 900 AD when word counts were used as a rough index of reading ease. In compiling and studying the body of laws called the Talmud, the Talmudists counted the occurrences of words and ideas seeking to distinguish differences in meaning.

Modern research into readability began in 1921; Thorndike published a list of English words used more frequently in texts. Assumptions were made that the more frequently a word was used, the more familiar readers became with it, and the easier it was to read. During the 1920's, research activities concentrated on looking for word factors that could be used to predict readability. Research broadened during the 1930's and throughout the 1940's, deriving formulas that could accurately predict readability using the least number of factors.

Readability formulas developed as a result of research into factors within writing that correlated highly with style difficulty. Most readability formula values were calculated by measuring sentence and word familiarity or word length.

In the 1940s, Rudolph Flesch developed a formula based on word length, sentence length and human interest in the content of an article. These formulas were adopted so that everyone would arrive at a conceptual analysis of reading levels and so that the application of reading could become more feasible in real life.

Some real life examples follow:

• More than one out of four cancer patients were not able to understand any of 30 booklets produced by the American Cancer Society, according to a 1995 study by Villanova University.
• The catalog of
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