I mentioned Rudolf Flesch the other day. In my days as a newspaper editor, I tried to interest young reporters in his advice for making writing easier to read.
I didn’t succeed.
Flesch is known for his “readability formula.” If you’ve ever had to buy a book suitable for a child who reads at the third-grade level, you are into Flesch’s territory. But I was interested in his observations about the way we think about writing.
Flesch told the story about how news organizations covered the first bombing of Berchtesgaden on Feb. 21, 1945. Reporters rushed to talk to the air crews. It was sensational.
The reporters were stunned that none of the young pilots or their crewmen knew that Adolf Hitler’s house was at Berchtesgaden. It was just another target, a spot on the map.
Flesch loved such stories. He thought writers should pay attention to what people know and don’t know. The 1930s and ‘40s were great times for polling, and Flesch followed the polls. As World War II ended, a lot of Americans thought everybody in Russia got the same pay. With tensions high about the threat of communism to the free enterprise system, only 30 percent of Americans could tell you what “free enterprise” meant.
Flesch said writers tend to overestimate their readers’ stock of information and underestimate their intelligence. Both assumptions are fatal. A baffled reader quits in frustration. A patronized reader quits in rage.
The thing to do, of course, is to find out what people know and what they don’t know, and then to right accordingly.
• Source: Rudolf Flesch, The Art of Readable Writing; New York, Collier Books, 1962, p. 30.
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