Hi, this is Karen McKee, The Scientist Videographer, and we're talking
about how to communicate your science to diverse audiences.\
\ One of the biggest obstacles for scientists
is explaining our work in everyday language. When you develop the script for a video or
other science communication product, how do you know if you are succeeding at this? \
Most word-processing programs contain a readability assessment function along with
grammar and spell-checking. This option is usually not turned on, but you can activate
it by clicking Options under the Tools menus or Preferences for the Mac. You want to select
the Grammar and Spelling tab and then check, \"show readability stats". Then all you
do is select Spelling and Grammar under the Tools bar in Word, and you will automatically
get the readability statistics for any text you select.\
\ Let's take a quick look at this in Word.
So we want to select Word and Preferences, and then select Spelling and Grammar. And
you'll notice that right down here, that readability statistics is not selected by
default. So you'll have to select it and hit OK.\
Now, Let's use an example paragraph from
one of my technical papers, which I\'92m showing here. You can assess the entire text in a
document or only a portion of the text. If you want to assess only a portion of the text,
then highlight it as I've done here. And then now go under Tools and click Spelling
and Grammar, and you are going to get a dialog box asking you if you want to continue checking
the remainder of the document. If you only want the stats for the highlighted portion,
then you select "no". And then you immediately get the readability statistics. If you want
to assess the entire text, then do the same thing, and select yes, and it will assess
the entire document.\ \
So what are these readability statistics?
\f0 The Flesch Reading Ease Score rates text on a 100 point scale; the higher the score,
the easier it is to understand the document; and for most standard documents, you want
to aim for a score around 60 or 70 or something in that vicinity.\
\ The Flesch-Kincaid Score rates text on a US
school grade level. For example, a score of 8 means that an eighth grader can understand
the document. But for a large, diverse audience you want to be going for a score of 10 or
lower. \f1 \
So let's take a look at the example I showed previously. This is from a technical
paper, and the language is somewhat complex and jargony. And if we look at the readability
statistics, we see the reading ease is very low: 15.6, and someone would need a 12th
grade education or higher to understand it.
But if we revise it here's a revision that expresses the same information, but in
more everyday language. Note that it's not dumbed down, It's just stated more
simply and with minimal technical jargon.
\f0 The reading ease is increased to 51.6 and someone with a 10\super th\nosupersub
grade education should be able to understand it. Notice also that I\'92ve also reduced
the word number from 51 to 33. You can use these indices to even improve your technical
writing.
Another useful bit of information is the proportion of passive sentences. Technical
writing tends to use this type of construction, but non-technical writing should strive to
use an active construction.
But people are often confused about what is meant by active versus passive construction.
Here\'92s an example of a passive construction.: \'93Increased salinity was found to cause
a shift in species composition.\'94 Here, the subject of the sentence receives the action
expressed in the verb. \ \
So here is the active construction: \'93Increased salinity caused a shift in species composition.
Here, the subject of the sentence performs the action expressed in the verb. \
\ So if you are unsure about whether your explanations
are understandable by a diverse audience, these readability indices are one tool to
help you out. \ \
This is Karen McKee, The Scientist Videographer. I hope you find the information in this video
helpful.
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