I am sure this is terribly interesting - but I find I glaze over at about
paragraph 2, despite all my efforts.
I always thought it was just me that found these Euro report summaries
almost unreadable (especially late on a Thursday afternoon with the sun
streaming in through the window) - but I am now delighted to know that it
isn't. It is just that they are appallingly badly written.
I banged this last one through Word's "readability" measuring tool and...
wow. An overall score of about 35 (when scores of 60-80 are advised for any
document to be widely understandable), "Grade" scores from 12 to 18 (an
American measure, but presumably meaning that the reading age was somewhere
around the postgraduate to doctoral thesis level - if not beyond).
Do these things read better in French? Are they deliberately written in
this appalling way? Can we all club together and send the writer a copy of
"Plain English"?
John Birch
Office for National Statistics
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