Readable Writing by Scientists and Researchers.

It should not be surprising that the concept of "readability," which became popular several decades ago, is still a major concern. This is true not only for communications within government agencies, the military and corporations, but also for writing by scientists and researchers. The notion of giving due consideration, beyond content itself, to how readers will process and react to one's writing is not new. In 1733, Ben Franklin said,

Good writing should proceed regularly from things known to things unknown, distinctly and clearly without confusion. The words used should be the most expressive that the language affords, provided that they are the most generally understood. Nothing should be expressed in two words that can be as well expressed in one; that is, no synonyms should be used, or very rarely, but the whole should be as short as possible, consistent with clearness; the words should be so placed as to be agreeable to the ear in reading; summarily it should be smooth, clear, and short, for the contrary qualities are displeasing.

While one may quibble with a call for expressive" and "pleasing" words insofar as scientific and academic writing is concerned, Franklin rightly emphasizes the basic importance of readers' reaction to and understanding of how writers use words.

This month, I would like to discuss some basic aspects of readability with respect to scientific and research writing. Two critical questions to ask about readability are 1) What is "readable" academic writing? and 2) How can researchers write readably? To many scientists and researchers, the answers to such questions may seem elementary, perhaps even annoyingly self-evident. Nevertheless, the fact is that all writers must be ever-vigilant both for obstacles to readable prose and for strategies that will make their prose as reader-centered as possible. Naturally, another important question follows: How can readability be measured? Let us take up each of these questions in turn.

Defining Readability

Essentially, readability theory views writing scientifically. Our current model for exact concise, and clear scientific and scholarly writing probably has its origins more than a century before Ben Franklin's time. By the early 1600s, Francis Bacon, the so-called "father of modem science," already had successfully promoted an economical and objective use of the English language. Bacon argued that scientific and scholarly writings were duty-bound to draw attention to their content, not their words. Readable and thereby useful scientific and academic writing should avoid flowery, convoluted sentences and instead strive for simple, unambiguous, and mathematically plain language.

In our own time, this historical call for objective and clear scientific and scholarly writing has evolved into a "plain English" movement. "Readable" writing is now "plain" writing--writing that the reader can readily understand without unnecessary work. Today the concept of plain writing is covered in some form in virtually every textbook on technical and scientific writing. Robert A. Day an editor and publisher of scientific books and journals, states the thesis of his 1995 text, Scientific English: A Guide for Scientists and Other Professionals, as follows: "The beauty of science is in the science, not in the language used to describe it. The beauty of English is its ability, when properly used, to express the most complicated concepts in relatively clear words and to point up the beauty of the science. Successful communication in science involves that magic word, clarity, a kissing cousin of simplicity." Or, as the 1994 edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA) pu ts it, "You can achieve clear communication, which is the prime objective of scientific reporting, by presenting ideas in an orderly manner and by expressing yourself smoothly and precisely By developing ideas clearly and logically and leading readers smoothly from thought to thought, you make the task of reading an agreeable one." Fundamentally then, the concept of readability simply places readers at the center of written communication, allowing them to understand the information presented without having to expend undue time and effort rereading. For better or for worse, various attempts have been made to measure readability objectively a point that calls for some attention here.

Measuring Readability

It is very likely that the word-processing software you use has a function that calculates the readability of whatever you write. There are also various style and grammar checkers that one may purchase separately, such as RightWriter, CorrectGrammar, Grammatik, and Editor. These programs use readability formulas (e.g., Flesch-Kincaid, Dale-Chall, Spache, and Gunning Fog) to measure the amount of technical vocabulary, numbers of syllables, and the lengths of words, sentences, and paragraphs. To get a feel for how readability formulas work, try computing the Gunning Fog Index by following three simple steps: First, count the sentences in several 100-word samples and divide the total word count by the sentence count to determine the average sentence length (ASL). Second, count the words in your sample that have at least three syllables to determine the percentage of hard words (PHW). Do not include proper names, simple compound words (e.g., afternoon, humankind), or verbs that have three syllables because of -e d or -es endings (e.g., enriches, extruded). Third, add the ASL and PHW from the first two steps and multiply that sum by 0.4. For example, an ASL of 15 and a PHW of 21 will yield, a value of 14.4 (36 X 0.4). This value, the Gunning Fog Index for your sample, indicates its grade level--meaning, in this case, that your readers should have a college-sophomore reading level. The various formulas work their magic in different ways. The Dale-Chall formula checks the ASL of a document and the number of words that are not on a list of a few thousand words. The Cloze procedure deletes every fifth word, determining the readability score by the reader's ability to fill in the blanks.

Such analyses seem rather straightforward and may have some use as benchmarks of sorts. Word and sentence length may indeed influence how accessible information and ideas are for readers. Readability calculations are, however, fraught with limitations, mainly because they rely on a simplistic view of reading. For one thing, shorter words and sentences are not always easier to read. A four-syllable word like separation is easier to understand than a three-letter word like ohm. Also, it is easy to manipulate readability formulas to yield higher or lower levels of difficulty with just a few simple textual revisions. Breaking up a document into a much greater number of short, simple sentences will reduce the reading grade-level without necessarily changing how difficult it actually is to understand the content. Readability formulas do not take into account a host of other factors, including the difficulty of the content, the degree of concrete versus abstract content, the use of specialized technical vocabulary, the complexity of sentence structure and syntax, the reader's prior knowledge of the subject, the clarity of the writer's purpose, the organization and coherence of the content, the integration of verbal and visual information, and the layout and design of the document. The act of reading is a complex process that has been shown by scholars to involve (consciously or not) cognitive, linguistic, and rhetorical concepts. The bottom line is that relying heavily on formulaic tricks is at best risky. How, then, is a writer to assess and practice readability?

Practicing Readability

The truest test of readability occurs when the writer also acts as reader. Putting yourself in your reader's shoes will improve the chances that the information in your document will be extracted, on first reading, as easily, painlessly, and unambiguously as possible. In a guide called Successful Scientific Writing (1996), scientists Janice R. Matthews, John B. Bowen, and Robert W. Matthews provide some guidelines for making scientific prose style "readable and interesting." They state, quite typically and traditionally, that the best style is usually the simplest. They add, however, that "This does not mean that you should avoid technical words. They are often not only necessary but the very best way to express a thought. What it does mean is that you should not include verbose words and phrases in a vain attempt to impress the reader with your intellect and scientific status." Matthews et al. provide the following example of a wordy sentence and its improvement for length and specificity:

A. "Following termination of avian exposure, there was a substantial incrementation in lung volume and, at this moment in time, it would appear that there has been a marginal degree of improvement in diffusing capacity" (34 words).

B. "After the man stopped keeping birds, his lung volume increased and diffusing capacity apparently improved slightly" (16 words).

Other ways of enhancing readability include maximizing clarity and rigor by considering the use of denotative versus connotative language (e.g., anthropomorphism), the use of passive versus active wording (subject-verb order), and appropriate uses of present tense versus past tense. A final approach that I will mention here is to maintain liveliness. You can keep things lively by varying sentence and paragraph length and, whenever possible, finding substitutes for overused "lazy verbs" such as present, observe, occur, demonstrate, show, and exhibit. There are many other ways to revise a document to improve its readability beside the few I have mentioned, but these provide a good start.

As a closing comment, it is worth underlining what readability is not. Constructing a readable document does not mean that a writer must be mechanical and uncreative. Any document bears the imprint and voice of an individual writer. These things do matter in making one's writing easier to read and understand, even if they just stem from a writer's use of a familiar or original analogy for explaining some phenomenon or concept. To make this point, I quote from the APA manual: "Thoughtful concern for the language can yield clear and orderly writing that sharpens and strengthens your personal style and allows for individuality of expression and purpose" (italics added). So we return full circle to Ben Franklin's wise words about being agreeable and pleasing to one's readers with a carefully crafted manner and style of expression. While the writing of scientists and researchers should interest readers by the significance of its content rather than by its literary merits, making any written communication readable does mean putting readers first.

References

Day, R.A. (1995). Scientific English: A guide for scientists and other professionals. Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press.

Matthews, J.R., Bowen, J.B., & Matthews, R.W (1996). Successful scientific writing: A Step-by-step guide for the biological and medical sciences. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (4h ed.). (1994). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.