I Speak Engineerese

Once while conducting a writing workshop, I was explaining how to write using “simple language.” A participant asked, “Shouldn’t we be trying to expand the reader’s vocabulary?”

We are all taught that the best way to improve your vocabulary is by reading. As a writer though, your job is communication, especially when your business is to provide essential information to the reader.

Read this sentence from a scientific paper on COVID.

“If SARS-CoV-2 does become endemic, age-stratified seroprevalence studies of endemic coronaviruses may provide estimates for incidence rates in the presence of higher levels of population immunity.”

Granted this sentence is intended for an audience of scientists, not farmers. If you wrote a sentence like this, with the intent of communicating to the general populace, most readers would need to look up every other word to understand the sentence.

I believe I have a good vocabulary. If I am reading directions, a story, or an article, I am not going to look-up each word I don’t know. More likely, I will stop reading altogether. If the writer’s intent is communication, then the writer failed.

As a communication specialist, which all technical writers and instructional designers are, you must write simply for your audience. According to Hollister Creative, “The average American adult reading level is that of a 9th grader. But popular mass-market novels are written at a 7th grade level because studies show adults prefer reading two grades below their ability…. However, a study by the Nielsen Norman Group showed that website usability measures greatly improve, even for highly literate readers, when the website is rewritten for lower-literacy users.”

How do you know you are writing simply enough? That’s easy. Since almost every professional writer uses MS Word, you will be happy to learn that Word provides a tool to check readability. There are also many tools online that you can use, such as Readability-score.com andRead-able.com.

MS Word provides scores for the Flesch Reading Ease test and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level test.

• Flesch Reading test
  This test rates text on a 100-point scale. The higher the score, the easier it is to understand the document. For most standard files, you want the score to be between 60 and 70.

• Flesh-Kincaid Grade Level test
  This test rates text on a U.S. school grade level. For example, a score of 8.0 means that an eighth grader can understand the document. For most documents, aim for a score of approximately 7.0 to 8.0.

To check your text for readability in MS Word:

1. Select File > Options >Proofing.
2. Scroll down until you see the heading When correcting spelling and grammar in Word.
3. Make sure that the boxes for Check grammar with spelling and Show readability statistics are checked.
4. Click OK at the bottom.
5. Select the specific text you want to check or check the entire document by clicking Review on the top bar.
6. Select Spelling & Grammar.
7. Spelling errors are shown first. You can correct them or click ignore all to open the Readability Statistics pop-up window.

At the bottom of the pop-up are your statistics.

Often when people ask what I do for a living, I tell them I translate engineerese. If you’ve ever worked with engineers, you know I mean that I simplify their jargon. This is how you communicate well with your audience.