Structure your Writing to Help Readers
- When?
- Wednesday 19 August 2009, 14:00 to 15:00
- Where?
- 39 BB 02
- Open to:
- Students, Staff
- Speaker:
- Dr G Harry McLaughlin
I shall briefly review the usefulness and shortcomings of readability formulas. I will then describe CLEAR, an online aid to plain writing which I am developing: it will colour-code submitted text to show the difficulty of every word and every sentence. But simplifying sentences and cutting out jargon is not enough. So the bulk of the talk will consist of advice on structuring documents to help readers find what they need and understand what they find.
My first career was in journalism. Eventually I worked each weekend as a subeditor for the Daily Mirror, then commuted 150 miles from London to Sheffield University. After obtaining a BA, I gained a PhD in experimental psychology from University College London while lecturing at the City University, London, and acting as consultant on technical writing in several industries.
In 1967 I moved to Toronto, Canada, to be Assistant Professor of Psycholinguistics at York University. A year later I was appointed Associate Professor of Human Communication Theory at the University of Syracuse, also acting as a consultant to NASA. I subsequently became Associate Professor of Computer Applications at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
While in Toronto I did clinical training which enabled me to go into private practice as a psychotherapist and neuropsychologist after I married in 1980 and moved to California. In 1969, I published SMOG, the Simple Measure of Gobbledygook (Journal of Reading, 12 (8) 639-646). This formula is widely used to estimate the number of years of education a reader needs to fully understand a piece of writing. Recently I have been appointed to a British Standards Institute Committee to help develop a British Standard for Readability of English.
