Writing Readably Doesn’t Mean You’re Stupid

Yesterday, I celebrated long writing. Today, I’m going to demonize it.

Fog Index Algorithm

The Fog Index Algorithm

My point yesterday was that long-form writing, such as a book, often engages readers effectively. But when it comes to words and sentences, length can be a reader’s enemy.

I hadn’t planned on this follow-up today. What spurred me on was a column by Meghan Daum in this morning’s Los Angeles Times. Headlined “Speaking down to Americans,” it discusses a recent study by the Sunlight Foundation analyzing the grade level of speeches by members of Congress. The analytical tool used by the study is the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, which, as Daum puts it, associates long words and sentences with higher grade levels.

The misleading implication of those grade levels is that the higher your writing scores, the smarter you are. As a result, much of the press coverage of this study has interpreted it to mean that by using shorter words and sentences, politicians are either becoming dumber or speaking down to Americans.

And that, I first thought, was the gist of Daum’s column, which a possibly overworked copy editor had subtitled as follows:

“Researchers have found that politicians’ rhetorical skills have taken a dive since 2005, when they were at an 11th-grade level.”

It turns out, though, that Daum doesn’t really think that. In fact, she argues that the foundation’s data are meaningless: such studies, she says, “measure not meaning or depth of thought but characters and syllables and average number of words per sentence.” And she criticizes both those who fault legislators for speaking plainly and the foundation for doing the analysis:

“It seems disingenuous to mourn the passing of a time when you needed a 17th-grade education to understand what your president was saying. Not as disingenuous, however, as using a hopelessly reductive study to assail one’s political enemies in the most predictable way.”

So Daum seems to be in favor of readability, but blithely tosses aside the Flesch-Kincaid test as useless. Similarly, The Atlantic’s Eric Randall, while in favor of short words and sentences, suggests that the test promotes verbosity: “Flesch-Kincaid rewards long words and winding sentences, but clarity rewards the opposite.”

Well, no. Flesch-Kincaid doesn’t reward long words. It penalizes them. The entire point of using the test is not to raise the grade level of your writing, but to lower it.

The confusion is the inevitable result of the decision to tie writing skills to reading comprehension grade levels. I’m not quite sure whom to blame for this fatal mistake. It doesn’t seem to have been readability maven Rudolf Flesch, whose original readability index used a 100-point scale (the higher the score, the more readable the prose). The error may have been introduced by Robert Gunning, inventor (in 1952) of the Fog Index. The Flesch-Kincaid test, developed in 1975, followed Gunning in using grade levels to assess writing.

Whatever the source of the grade-level equivalence, it’s a problem. When I used to lead in-house seminars on readability for editors of technical magazines, descriptions of the grading system always backfired at first.

Our readers have PhD’s, they’d think. We’re smart too. We can write at grade 20! Bring on the 50-word sentences and sesquipedalian locutions!

The real goal, of course, is just the opposite. If you can write at grade-level 5, you should—not because you want to reach fifth-graders, but because even your doctoral readers will likely find such prose lucid, appealing, and memorable.

The same caveat applies today as yesterday, however: It all depends. Talented writers can reel off long, polysyllabic sentences to brilliant effect; inept writers can produce wretched short ones.

The smartest writers combine both approaches. It isn’t the length of any one sentence that matters—it’s the average over the course of several paragraphs or pages. Long words and sentences are not proscribed by Flesch-Kincaid. They just need  balancing with short ones.

The Flesch-Kincaid test or the Fog Index, used circumspectly, can help improve your writing. But remember this crucial point: you’re testing for readability—not for your intelligence.

Lytro Photography and the Advance of Data Journalism

The Lytro camera

The Lytro camera

Until this weekend, when I came across Rob Walker’s brief article about it in the December Atlantic, I had figured the new Lytro camera was more cool gimmick than serious game changer. You’ve probably heard about the technology already. Rather than focusing when you take the picture, you let others focus it later, when they view the image, by clicking on the area they want to see clearly. (Confused? See Lytro’s examples.)

This effect is made possible by capturing far more data than a typical camera. One way to achieve it, Walker writes, is to use “hundreds of cameras to capture all the visual information in a scene,” then use a computer to process the results “into a many-layered digital object.” Another is what the Lytro does: squeeze “hundreds of micro lenses into a single device.”

As technological advances go it’s impressive. But to a photographer, it’s not a big deal. Autofocus usually works just fine.

But Walker’s article made me realize who really benefits from the Lytro: not the photographer, but the viewer. The technology takes part of the artistic decision away from the artist and gives it to the audience. Likewise in journalism, the technology may help shift control of content from the producer to the consumer, as UC Berkeley new-media professor Richard Koci Hernandez told Walker:

Imagine, he suggests, a photojournalist covering a presidential speech whose audience includes a clutch of protesters. Using a traditional camera, he says, “I could easily set my controls so that what’s in focus is just the president, with the background blurred. Or I could do the opposite, and focus on the protesters.” A Lytro capture, by contrast, will include both focal points, and many others. Distribute that image, he continues, and “the viewer can choose—I don’t want to sound professorial—but can choose the truth.”

I’m still not convinced that the Lytro technology by itself is, as Walker says, revolutionary. But it is yet another development that hands more power to the consumers of journalism by giving them more data.

Journalism, of course, has always involved data. Even when you tell a story about an event, as in narrative journalism or photojournalism, you’re presenting the viewer with data. But those data are limited and selective, in the service of a particular point of view about the reality you’re describing. If you choose to focus on the president, that’s what your audience sees. With the Lytro, however, you give them access to far more data; now they, not you, choose what to focus on.

If you don’t think data journalism is going to be a big deal, consider the Lytro and the trend it represents. Technology will not stop here. As it evolves, it will enable everyone to capture and distribute increasingly large amounts of data. And in response, journalism’s role will correspondingly shift from telling stories to giving its audience the data they need to tell their own.

My Love for Magazines Lies Bleeding

MUD day 17:

There are days, perhaps when my inner curmudgeon breaks through my usual resistance, when I’m convinced that magazines, as a useful format, are truly dead. Yes, it may just be me or my desperation for a topic in this month of mandatory daily blogging. Ask me tomorrow and I may feel more hopeful. But what has me worried is my oddly sour reaction to this Folio article on magazine design. A few years ago I would have been vitally interested. Now it just seems irrelevant.

It’s not just the paper version of magazines I’m pessimistic about, but the very concept. There are some who feel that tablets will be the salvation of magazines. I’m not so sure. One of the negatives in Linda Holmes’s review of the new Kindle Fire today is that its 7-inch screen is too small for magazines. Full magazine pages, she says, don’t work well: “You can zoom, but when you [turn] to to the next page, you pop back out to seeing the full page, and to read anything, you have to zoom again.”

But having just last night downloaded with some interest the December issue of The Atlantic to my iPad, more than a third larger than the Fire, I’m not so sure size is the real problem. Paper pages just don’t translate well to the screen—the turns are slow, images build too slowly, the fonts are too big or too small. You need to enlarge and shrink too often, or tap too many times to get to the better “reading view.” The articles might have been pretty good—but I don’t know. I was too distracted to actually do any concentrated reading.

To me, books seem like an eternal format. They work as well for me on a tablet as on a page. But the format to which I dedicated most of my professional career has a poor prognosis in any medium. I fear I will soon be attending a funeral for my old friend, the magazine.