The Cat Sat on the Mat

There you go – ‘the cat sat on the mat’ – just about the simplest sentence in the English language and with a readability score of 100, the highest you can get.

If you didn’t know about readability scores, then you’ve probably never heard of Rudolf Flesch.

Herr Flesch is responsible for two readability tests, which are really useful when you’re writing. Let’s concentrate on his Reading Ease test, which can give every piece of prose a score, based on words per sentence, syllables per word and so on. The higher the score, the easier it is to read – which brings us back to the Cat on the Mat.

Reader’s Digest has a score of about 65. For Barack Obama fans, the Harvard Law Review is down around 30. Closer to home, a recent piece in The Times on William Hague scores 50. The lead story in The Sun – Stig was SAS Hero – scores 62.

Score 90-100 on the test, and your writing is easily understandable by an average 11 year old; 60-70 and you’re looking for someone who’s 13 to 15. Anything around 30, you need to be on campus.

Given that you can’t open a newspaper this morning without reading Tony Blair’s memoirs, I started wondering about speeches. Clearly Blair was a more effective public speaker than Gordon Brown. Was that because his speeches were simpler? After all it doesn’t come much simpler than “education, education, education.”

Apparently not. Blair talking about education in 2007 scored 66. Brown a year later on the economy scored 67. Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech – which I’d always thought one of the simplest speeches I’d heard – scored 58.

Any marketing man will always tell you that your message must match the intended audience. And if you’re writing something, it’s easy to check. How do you find the Reading Ease score of something you’ve written? No problem. Ask Microsoft Word. It’s in Word-Preferences-Spelling and Grammar. Tick ‘show readability statistics’ then run a spelling check under Tools.

So far, this blog scores 56 – exactly half way between The Times and The Sun. Gulp. I should be writing for the Daily Mail…

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