A smack on the bot

I wrote some reports. Then they were put through a 'readability' engine. What happened next?

Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash

Well, my homework had been marked.

Last year, I wrote and edited a series of reports for something called the Transform initiative. This is a bold venture established by the part of the UK Foreign Office responsible for development; the consumer goods company Unilever; and the professional services company EY. Together, they source and fund projects that help entrepreneurs in low-income countries reach more customers and ultimately help address issues of sanitation, clean water and healthcare.

Even in that dry paragraph you’ve just read (or skimmed), you’ll see that I had to learn some lessons about nomenclature and language. For example: never use terms like ‘Third World’, ‘charity’ and ‘aid’. 

I bet some people will see that as self-censoring wokeness. It’s not. The way the rich world works with the poor one has changed. Language should evolve with it. 

We produced what’s called the Transform Flagship Library. My mixed metaphor alert went off (ships? Libraries?), but it was too late to change the name: and it’s the content, not the title, that matters.

The feedback from the Transform partners was more than encouraging. One said they ‘never imagined [the reports] would be so good (assuming they’d just sit on a shelf, which is not happening at all)’. 

Which is great. That it’s a pleasant surprise they are read at all is a sobering comment, however, on the low expectations people have of this type of work. No wonder so much corporate literature can be a spiritless endeavour. It’s not easy starting a piece of writing in the knowledge that hardly anyone is going to read it.

But the reports have been read – and not only read, but a very good data analysis company has put them through a ‘linguistic simplicity engine’. How did that go?

The scorecard

Image from the Transform reports

The ‘engine’ in question is not some spanking new algorithm, but the Flesch-Kincaid readability test originally devised by a US navy captain in 1975.  J Peter Kincaid and his team wanted to make the technical information contained in manuals and electronic documentation easier to read. You can easily see why. Most of us struggle with the instructions for a food mixer. Imagine what it’s like taking delivery of a nuclear submarine and thinking, ‘where do I press start?’

Here’s what Sam Knowles, founder, MD and chief data storyteller at Insight Agents had to say about Transform:

They come out as pretty readable – a B-grade overall, a readability score suggesting ten years of education required to read them straightforwardly (early secondary school, so Daily Mail equivalent), which is good for technical subjects.

Almost a third of sentences have more than 30 syllables which, in a long text, can bring about tiredness. Very low on clichés and use of the passive voice (which is good), pretty formal.

15% of (adjectives + verbs + nouns) are adjectives, connoting emotion; 20% are verbs, connoting actions; and, 65% are nouns, connoting facts, data etc. Not atypical, and more emotional than many corporate narratives. Given the human stories they tell at the heart, I’d have expected more emotion (and so more adjectives).

As I said to my clients and agency partners, if they hadn’t scored well on readability, then they would have been entitled to ask for their money back.

Not that making them read in a straightforward way was straightforward. 

The world of the SDGs, of which this is a small part, is full of acronyms (like SDGs). They are big on abstract nouns such as ‘accountability’, ‘responsibility’ and  ‘sustainability’ – no wonder it was hard to keep the syllable count under control. There’s also a species of language – let’s call it Corporate Touchy-Feely – which leads you to using words like ‘community’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘engagement’ so often they become the linguistic equivalent of lettuce: they add a bit of green to the dish, but the nutritional value is pretty poor.

The Transform board members were determined these wouldn’t be a box-ticking exercises in guff-production. They were militantly pro-plain English. That is one of the reasons they and their projects they support are prospering. As individuals and as a body, they think that to be readable puts them well on the way to being believable. That made the writer’s job a lot easier, even when that writer – that’d be me – was trying to translate often complex ideas into the kind of language you’d use down the pub, or in the street market.

That the English was of a Daily Mail standard of clarity was really pleasing. Not everyone is a fan of the content in that newspaper. But ask most British (and many international) journalists, and they’ll tell you the Mail is the most rigorous and demanding newspaper to write for, with the highest standard of sub-editing. I write travel features for them. We have a good relationship, marred only occasionally when the editor gives me a blast for ‘trying to be too clever’. And I do overwrite, sometimes. Writing for the Mail is like training to run a marathon. You soon learn where the flab is. 

Emotional rescue

A person in an advanced state of adjectival arousal. Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

I got very excited by the paragraph about adjectives and ‘emotion’. 

Here’s why. The older I get as a writer the more I actively try to use nouns rather than adjectives. 

Adjectives are too easy, especially in travel writing. I want to know, and I think most readers want to know, what things are, what they are made of and how they came to be. That requires facts, insight – and nouns. To take the adjective I hate most at present, I’m sick of reading about cities (or communities) being ‘vibrant’. Why and how does it vibrate? Who is doing the vibrating? Can you hear, smell and touch the said vibrancy? 

Adjectives are lazy. Emotion? I think a writer can convey that through tones and textures and juxtaposing facts. But when you do reach for an adjective, make it count. You noticed that ‘lazy’? 

(I hovered over the word ‘bold’ in the second paragraph. Losing it doesn’t change the sense and perhaps makes the copy seem more level and unflashy. But Transform is a bold idea: let’s say it).

I’m glad there weren’t more adjectives in the reports. There was plenty of emotion in the stories we told. But the documents are designed to show that these projects are businesses which are delivering for their customers and meeting targets thanks in part to the help from Transform. That’s a hard-headed message. 

How you can improve the readability test and bots

The readability tests and grammar algorithms miss something important – maybe the most important thing there is – when you’re judging how easily a piece reads.

Punctuation.

That’s probably because it’s hard to make an empirical judgement based on how often you use the different punctuation marks. This is a matter of style –  and may even vary from language to language. I was working with a Norwegian writer recently. He said one difficulty (it was his only difficulty) with English is that it uses far fewer commas than his native language!

Have a look at the way I’ve used punctuation in this piece: when there’s a colon rather than a semi-colon, when there’s a comma – and when I add a dash to add a bit of pace.

And note when I elected to end a sentence or a paragraph.

That’s part of the punctuation craft too.

Let’s end with a gloriously unreadable piece of text

Proust: he didn’t make it as an author of American navy manuals

This is a sentence – yes, a sentence – from Marcel Proust’s  Du côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way):

"But I had seen first one and then another of the rooms in which I had slept during my life, and in the end I would revisit them all in the long course of my waking dream: rooms in winter, where on going to bed I would at once bury my head in a nest, built up out of the most diverse materials, the corner of my pillow, the top of my blankets, a piece of a shawl, the edge of my bed, and a copy of an evening paper, all of which things I would contrive, with the infinite patience of birds building their nests, to cement into one whole; rooms where, in a keen frost, I would feel the satisfaction of being shut in from the outer world (like the sea-swallow which builds at the end of a dark tunnel and is kept warm by the surrounding earth), and where, the fire keeping in all night, I would sleep wrapped up, as it were, in a great cloak of snug and savoury air, shot with the glow of the logs which would break out again in flame: in a sort of alcove without walls, a cave of warmth dug out of the heart of the room itself, a zone of heat whose boundaries were constantly shifting and altering in temperature as gusts of air ran across them to strike freshly upon my face, from the corners of the room, or from parts near the window or far from the fireplace which had therefore remained cold—or rooms in summer, where I would delight to feel myself a part of the warm evening, where the moonlight striking upon the half-opened shutters would throw down to the foot of my bed its enchanted ladder; where I would fall asleep, as it might be in the open air, like a titmouse which the breeze keeps poised in the focus of a sunbeam—or sometimes the Louis XVI room, so cheerful that I could never feel really unhappy, even on my first night in it: that room where the slender columns which lightly supported its ceiling would part, ever so gracefully, to indicate where the bed was and to keep it separate; sometimes again that little room with the high ceiling, hollowed in the form of a pyramid out of two separate storeys, and partly walled with mahogany, in which from the first moment my mind was drugged by the unfamiliar scent of flowering grasses, convinced of the hostility of the violet curtains and of the insolent indifference of a clock that chattered on at the top of its voice as though I were not there; while a strange and pitiless mirror with square feet, which stood across one corner of the room, cleared for itself a site I had not looked to find tenanted in the quiet surroundings of my normal field of vision: that room in which my mind, forcing itself for hours on end to leave its moorings, to elongate itself upwards so as to take on the exact shape of the room, and to reach to the summit of that monstrous funnel, had passed so many anxious nights while my body lay stretched out in bed, my eyes staring upwards, my ears straining, my nostrils sniffing uneasily, and my heart beating; until custom had changed the colour of the curtains, made the clock keep quiet, brought an expression of pity to the cruel, slanting face of the glass, disguised or even completely dispelled the scent of flowering grasses, and distinctly reduced the apparent loftiness of the ceiling."

This breaks every rule we ever teach at Forthwrite. Try and locate the heart of this sentence – the main verb and object – we say. Dear Marcel – we cannot. The meaning keeps slipping from image to image, memory to memory: just like sequences in a dream.

The Fleisch-Kincaid test gives it a readability score of -515.1. A score of +10 is considered ‘extremely difficult to read’.

More where this came from

Learn more about our courses on clear writing and successful pitching.