Readability
From Clinicaltools.com
Readability refers to whether a text can be read easily by its intended audience. Obviously, a text targeting members of the general public should be written very differently from text targeting physicians. For a brief introduction, check out Wikipedia's entry, Readability: In Writing. (On a related note, the Wikimedia Foundation recently released a Simple English version of Wikipedia.)
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Online Tools
Juicy Studio
Juicy Studio provides an online Readability Test that allows one to enter a Web page's URL in order to ascertain the reading level required for comprehending that page. Readability tests are only approximate measure but are nevertheless helpful. For an example, I tested (2008-02-25) the following buprenorphine-related pages on Juicy Studio (see said site for descriptions of the three algorithms):
| Wikipedia: Buprenorphine | | | |
| CSAT: About Buprenorphine Therapy | | | |
| MedlinePlus: Buprenorphine Sublingual and Buprenorphine and Naloxone Sublingual</center> | | | |
Wikipedia's buprenorphine article proved the most difficult, followed by CSAT and then MedlinePlus.
Google Docs
Note that if you want to test your text's readability without posting it online, you can copy and paste it into a Google Doc, click on the File drop-down list, and then choose Word count...; you then should see a bunch of statistics about your document. For an example, I pasted the main text (no sidebars) from a BuprenorphineCME course and found that the Flesch Reading Ease was 41.69, and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level was 10.00.
Resources
General Readability
Three short articles from usability guru Jakob Nielsen:
- Writing for the Web - Sun Microsystems' excellent writing guide
Health-Related Readability
- Clear & Simple: Developing Effective Print Materials for Low-Literate Readers - A guide developed by the National Cancer Institute
- Words to Watch - Fact Sheet - Ask Me 3's list of "problem words" used by many health professionals, along with simpler alternatives.
Academic Articles
Click on the following links for the most recent PubMed search results for the following MeSH Terms:
