hmmm….

December 1, 2007 in PhDs, randomness, readability | 3 comments

cash advance

Does that mean I’m an officially deprogrammed PhD? Or does it mean my PhD might be revoked? I hope not. After all, what’s the point of writing if no one can read it, right?!

(I got the link to the meter from brownfemipower, where there is also a nice discussion in comments of the readability scale and its implications.)

One nugget from wikipedia:

Since the 1930s, national literacy surveys have shown that the average adult in the U.S. reads at the 8th-grade level. It is important to remember that one’s level of education is no indication of one’s reading skill. Many high-school graduates read at the 8th-grade level, college graduates at the 10th-grade level. With practice, readers with little formal education can often become advanced readers.

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April 13, 2008 at 3:50 pm

Vanessa Villaverde

Vanessa Villaverde’s avatar

I recently underwent a training on how to simplify my writing on healthcare so that I could write about topics that could be published on a federal agency’s website ( I won’t name which one). The training was on “plain language”, a concept that re emerged in Bill Clinton’s June 1, 1998 memorandum asking federal agencies to simplify language in the federal register by January of 1999. Though this proposal has supposedly been meet, studies continue to find that government agencies speak in a language inaccessible to the public.

Here is a link to a study that finds government agency websites are, on average, at an 11th grade reading level. If wikipedia says that most Amercan high schoolers read at an 8th grade level and most college graduates at a 10th grade level, it appears that only those with a graduate degree can access important websites. There is both the immediate problem that most Americans cannot understand how their tax dollars are being used and the complicated divide between the governing and those governed. I wish literacy courses were the answer.

On a positive note, there are younger people within the government who are trying to do more than speak in “plan language”, but trying to make government more accessible.