College and Research Libraries


• 

Review- Articles 
Formula fo~ Writing 

The Art of Plain Talk. By Rudolf Flesch. 
New York, Harper, 1946. xm, 210p. 
How to write readable English is the main 

topic of this compact little volume. It is a 
skilfully written popularization of the au-
thor's doctoral dissertation, Marks of a Read-
able Style (Teachers · College, Columbia 
University, 1943). It contains many go~d 
hints illustrated by fitting sample passages 
of ·easy and difficult style. 

But it is more than a book of rules foi' 
asptnng writers. Dr. Flesch offers his own 
objective device for determining how difficult 
any given sample of reading matter is in 
terms of the educational level of readers. 
His formula takes account of average sen-
tence length, frequency of affixes, and fre-
quency of personal references, and assigns 
a specific weight to each ·of these factors. 
The final score tells us where the reading 
sample falls on a scale running from "very 
easy" (comics) to "very difficult" (scientific 
articles) . ' 

The selection of the three factors is justi-
fied as foll<?ws: (I) Short sentences have been 
shown to be easier to understand than long 
ones. ( 2) The frequency of affixes is taken 
as an index of abstractness; the more ab-
stract, the more difficult is the reading matter. 
( 3) · Frequent references to persons makes 
reading easier. 

There is nothing new about sentence 
length or personal references as criteria of 
comprehension. Both were used by W. S. 
Gray and B. E. Leary (What Makes a Book 
Readable, 1935) and other investigators. 
However, measuring the degree of abstract-
ness by the number of affixes seems to be 
Dr. Flesch's original contribution. 

Somewhat puzzling to the uninitiated may 
be the fact that Dr. Flesch discusses many 
more factprs of readability then are covered 
by his formula; for instance, the use of 
repetition, filler words, ample punctuation, 

APRIL, 1947 

and verbs in the active voice, and the avoid-
ance of commenting adjectives, compound 
prepositions, unnecessary connectives, relative 
pronouns, and rhetorical devices. If these 
factors are important in a readable style, 
as Dr. Flesch undoubtedly believes, why are 
they omitted from his formula? The selected 
factors probably showed a high correlation 
with the factors omitted. If so, his formula 
might be considered valid as a short-cut device 
for measuring readability. The danger is that 
naive popularizers, hoping to produce a read-
able style, may focus their attention on Dr. 
Flesch's three factors alone and discover that 
they brought forth none-too-readable pas-
sages. Used as an index, his formula does 
seem much handier to use than, for instance, 
Irving Lorge's readability index ("Predicting' 
Readability." Teachers College Record, 
March 1944). · 

Any writer of textbooks or popular non-
fiction will profit greatly from Dr. Flesch's 
words of advice. Students of reading and 
library science will be especially interested 
in his rejection of C. K. Ogden's Easier Eng-
lish and his arguments against the use of 
E. L. Thorndike's The Teachers Word Book 
as a means of determining readability. Pre-
vious investigators (for instance, Gray, Dale, 
and Lorge) considered vocabulary as an im~ 
portant index _ of difficulty. Flesch shows 
that a passage containing many rare words 
may still be easy to read. 

Thirteen years ago, Edgar Dale and R. W. 
Tyler wrote: "There are no scientific tech-
niques by means of which to make an accurate 
estimate of the reading difficulty of books and 
pamphlets on the library shelves" (Library 
Quarterly, July 1934). Dr. Flesch is one 
of several investigators claiming to provide 
the lacking techniques. It is now up to li-
brarians and publishers to test and apply 
them, since reading is one of their basic prob-
lems.-Robert H. Muller. 

191