By Dana P Skopal, PhD
Organisations, such as companies or government departments, produce many documents for their communities. However, the questions are whether the information in those documents is clear and, secondly, how do different readers go through the document to understand the information.
With the global pandemic continuing and many people working at home, information is now predominately written and read while sitting at a computer or holding a mobile device. Readers use different reading strategies to locate and understand details, and these strategies can change if they are reading on a computer or if they print out the document. Documents need to be read, and a reader has to be able to understand and use that information.
Throughout the ongoing Covid-19 medical situation, governments have been giving information about what citizens can do and how businesses need to operate safely. For example, visit the NSW Government website: https://www.nsw.gov.au/covid-19/what-you-can-and-cant-do-under-rules
Perhaps think about how you look up this information and how do you read it. Do you read in segments or do you focus on headings and skip from webpage to webpage? Researchers analysed the content of online government documents (federal and Western Australian) related to COVID-19 to determine how hard this information was to read; see https://theconversation.com/most-government-information-on-covid-19-is-too-hard-for-the-average-australian-to-understand-153878. They used readability formulas and found that a lot of government-produced COVID-19 information was not easy to read.
That formula approach is only one way of assessing the usability of such information. We argue there is a difference between readability formulas and usability testing. The readability formulas are usually based on sentence length and number of syllables, not the meaning or placement of the words. Our research highlighted how the descriptive words in headings can impact the usability of the written information and sentence length was only one variable. Document usability testing can investigate if a reader can find all the information they need to act on and whether document design, including the order of information, assists or hinders them.
It is important to keep the community updated with health information, but organisational writers need to step back and take on board how different readers may approach the written information. Testing even with six to ten readers can give a writer valuable information about the clarity of the message (see Schriver, K. A. (1997). Dynamics in document design: Creating texts for readers. New York: John Wiley, and Skopal, D. P. & Herke, M. (2017). Public discourse syndrome: reformulating for clarity. Text & Talk, 37 (1), 141–164, doi: 10.1515/text-2016-0041).
Writing and reading are like tools – essential devices we need for communicating in our communities as well as in the business and regulatory world. Let’s work together to ensure we write clearly for our readers.
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