Module 2: Readability and Comprehensibility
Objectives: Scientific papers are often hard to read and hard to understand. In this workshop we will discuss the factors which contribute to readability and comprehensibility, and we will discuss how these two aspects of a paper can be measured. We will learn basic terminology including readability indices, comprehensibility, Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level.
Practicum: In this workshop, students will analyze a research article of their choice, and determine the readability indices for the article. They will then compare these to standards of readability for general English and for higher education.
Occasionally, people write for themselves, for example when students take notes in class or shoppers jot down items on a shopping list. However, biomedical writing is most often for others to read. The job of the writer really isn’t finished until some other interested person is able to read and absorb what we have written. Therefore, what we write must be readable and, some would add, comprehensible.
The readability of a piece of writing is determined by more than just its literary qualities. In practical terms, the size, colour and style of the font are all quite important. Also the layout of print on a page is important – it should neither be too crowded nor confusing to follow, and publishers will actually have guidelines as to the proportion of “white space” that should occupy a page. In biomedical writing, the appropriate use of illustrations is also central to comprehending written text. These concerns, of course, may be addressed at the point of publication. However, at the time that we begin to write, our primary concern is with the words and sentences on the page. In particular, an early concern must be whether or not our target readers can actually read the words and sentences what we have written, and that will be our working definition of readability in this chapter.
We would like to be able to gauge the readability of our writing before its final use – for example before it is published in a journal (if we are researchers), or before it is submitted as a homework assignment (if we are students). A time-honoured and occasionally perilous way of assessing the readability of our writing is to ask a friend or colleague for their advice. The danger, of course, lies in putting our faith in the editorial skills of someone who may be no more gifted in biomedical writing than ourselves. Nonetheless, the practice is almost universal, and even someone with no particular knowledge of biomedicine may be able to pick up spelling mistakes and grammatical errors before these slips of the pen have a chance to embarrass us. If such help is available, one would have to be foolishly self-confident not to take advantage of it.
There are also more objective and reliable tools for assessing the readability of a piece of text. Furthermore, these readability indices may appeal to the scientist in us, as they often give an actual numerical rating of our writing. There are dozens of such indices available, and some of them actually come packaged within word processing programmes such as Microsoft Word. For example, if we select the portion of this chapter to the end of this paragraph, and choose the “Spell and Grammar Check” tool in the word processing software being used, following completion of the check a window appears with the following statistics:
Counts
- Words 380
- Characters 1892
- Paragraphs 4
- Sentences 17
Averages
- Sentences per Paragraph 5.7
- Words per Sentence 21.6
- Characters per Word 4.8
Readability
- Passive Sentences 29%
- Flesch Reading Ease 46.6
- Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level 12.0
The last three items under “Readability” give us just that – a measure of how easy it is for others to read what we have written. These items, however, require a bit of explanation.
Passive sentences, sentences in which the subject “receives” some kind of action, are generally thought of as somewhat more difficult to understand that sentences written in the more common “active voice”. In general English, perhaps one or two percent of sentences are in the passive form. In biomedical writing, however, passive sentences are much more common and often make up twenty to thirty percent of the text. On this basis, one would assume that for most people biomedical writing is harder to read than general English.
The Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level are based on the length of words and sentences. In general, longer words and longer sentences are harder read (and so have lower readability indices). More precisely, the Flesch Reading Ease index uses a calculation that takes into account the number of words in each sentence and the number of syllables (rather than letters) per word. A score of 30 or less would have low readability and would probably be most suitable for readers with a college or university level of education. A score of 60 to 70 is appropriate for learners at the junior/senior high school interface, and passages with a score of 90 to 100 should be readable by learners with a mid-primary school level of ability.
Formula for Flesch-Reading Ease:
The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level tries to make direct correlations to American grade levels. This is useful when trying to match reading tasks to particular groups of students. However, this scale does not correspond perfectly to the Flesch Reading Ease scale and it breaks down beyond the high school graduation level.
Formula for Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level:
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